Deployment Models

You can deploy your Frends installation in most ways possible.

Because Frends is built upon central management UI and distributed Agents performing the actual execution, we provide and support almost any combination of deployment types available.

Self-hosted Deployment

Starting with the basic type, in self-hosted deployment the Agents reside on your own servers and computers as a service, or in your own cloud environment outside Frends cloud. Along with .NET runtime it will handle the triggering of Processes. This type of deployment setup can also be called on-premise deployment, in case the Agents are installed solely to your own on-premise server environment. You can of course mix and match between these as needed.

In this deployment type, connections to your Frends Tenant are done through Azure Service Bus messaging. As the Frends UI is solely used for development and other management tasks, for example API calls will be connected directly to your environment and Agents instead of going through Frends's cloud environment where the UI resides. Even in the situation where the Frends UI would be unavailable, the Agents will continue execution without problems.

In case interoperability between Agents are required, for example when calling Subprocesses remotely over Agent Groups, these are also coordinated over the Service Bus messaging instead of direct connections between the Agents performing the execution.

Self-hosted deployment is essential when you require strict data sovereignty, compliance, or have security requirements that disallow the data being located outside your internal network or geographic location. In this deployment model you are also in full control of the infrastructure, maintenance, updates and monitoring, so while it provides more control over the environment, it also presents additional required actions to perform.

PaaS Deployment

In case you simply want ease of use from your integration platform, Frends also provides full Platform as a Service deployment. In this deployment model, also known as Frends Cloud deployment model, the Agents will be created to Frends cloud environment by Frends Support, and the support is also then responsible for managing and maintaining your Frends execution environment.

Because Frends will take care of the infrastructure, you can focus on being creative and create all the integrations you need, and expect them to work and run flawlessly. Because the execution environment is in the cloud, connectivity to and from outside sources will not require any additional setup or thought, it just works.

While you will not have direct control over where your Processes are executed and thus your data processed, rest assured that we have taken every action possible to keep the environment secure and up to date. Depending on your subscription tier, you can control geographically where your environment is hosted, in order to keep up with legislation about data processing and storage. With higher tier you can also select how the resources for your execution environment are shared.

While resource sharing might sound scary, different Tenants cannot access each other's data in any event, even if they are processed on the same shared resources.

Container Deployment

With the latest versions of Frends, support for containerized deployments of Frends Agents has been improved greatly.

While it has long been possible to deploy Agents as containers in Kubernetes clusters, latest versions added support for dynamic launching of additional containerized Agents when required by allowing unspecified Agents to connect to Agent Groups at will. This will provide more adjustment options to available resources, increasing performance whenever it is needed, and reducing the Agent count once the highest peak has passed.

While it does not matter if the Kubernetes cluster is located on-premise or in the cloud, it also does not matter if the containerized Agents are used with other on-premise or cloud Agents. In this deployment model you are also allowed to mix different types of Agents together.

Hybrid Deployment

As has been mentioned on all the different deployment models, mixing different types of deployment plans together is very possible with Frends, and only your own use case will dictate what you need to do and can do.

By default, Frends comes with a PaaS cloud Agent as part of the development environment on all tiers. From there, you can either install more Agents to your own server or cloud environment to create a self-hosted deployment, or request more PaaS Agents to be added to your Tenant from the Frends Support as full PaaS deployment. If your pricing tier and contract allows, setting up a Kubernetes cluster for your Agents and having them in High Availability configuration is also possible.

Whatever your use case and requirements are, deploying Frends Agents should be possible in most ways. Running a Frends Agent on your own computer is also totally viable method to run Processes locally, although outside connectivity might require some additional setup in that scenario.