Frends Runtime

The Frends runtime environment is built upon Agents, that execute your Processes. Agents working together as an Agent Group allow simultaneous execution and load balancing, and different Environments provide common values and settings for the Agent Groups.

Agents

Agents are the executable software of Frends, performing the Processes as C# executables in the server or environment they have been deployed to. Environments and Agent Groups are mostly logical containers and visual elements tying things together for the user, and Agents are deployed as part of your infrastructure and then connect to your Frends Tenant as part of Agent Groups and Environments.

Types of Agents

Depending on where and how the Agent is installed to, it can be classified either as Frends Cloud Agent or Self Service Agent. Frends Cloud Agents, also commonly called only as Cloud Agents, are automatically deployed Agents that reside in Frends Cloud Environment. Unlike Self Service Agents, which are Agents installed by our customers into their own infrastructure, Cloud Agents are managed and monitored by Frends Platform Operations team.

Self Service Agents, which are also often called On Premise or Ground Agents, are installed and managed by the customers themselves. They can also be installed to cloud environments as well as to your local hardware, depending on your needs. It's also perfectly possible to mix and match different deployments, creating a hybrid deployment of Frends.

You can learn more about different deployment models at Deployment Models page.

In order to determine the types of Agents installed in your Frends Tenant, you can head over to Administration > Environments page, and browse the Agent Groups. A good naming scheme will provide you with information about usage and location of the Agents and Agent Groups, and the UI will also show a small cloud icon next to Frends Cloud Agents. To differentiate the types of Agents further, Cloud Agents will not have any settings available to them in the Control Panel, whereas multiple configuration options exist for Self Service Agents.

Cross-Platform Agents

Another way of differentiating Frends Agents is by the targetable operating systems and supported .NET versions.

The latest model of Frends Agent is the Cross-Platform Agent, which can be installed to any operating system that supports .NET platform. Windows and Linux are generally supported at least, alongside containerized environments. Cross-Platform Agent supports .NET Standard 2.0 and .NET 8 as target frameworks for Processes.

The legacy version of Agent supports either .NET Standard 2.0 and .NET Framework 4.7.1, but can only be run on Windows operating systems. As the naming suggests, only legacy support is provided for these Agents, and it is highly recommended to use Cross-Platform Agents moving forward.

To determine whether you are using Cross-Platform Agents or Legacy Agents, you can see this from the Advanced Settings for Agent Group in Environments administration page. If Cross-Platform option is turned on, all the Agents in that Agent Group have to be Cross-Platform Agents. Otherwise all the Agents should be Legacy if the option is turned off.

High Availability

While most deployments contain only one Agent for each Agent Group, it's possible to deploy multiple agents into High Availability configuration, which along with a load balancer can split the executions and load on to multiple Agents. This allows for more performance and better availability of your integration service through horizontal scaling. Containerization can be used with this configuration to dynamically launch new Agents if required.

Learn more about High Availability configuration here.

Gateway Agent

Gateway Agents, or API Gateways are specialized Agents that perform load balancing and proxying for your APIs.

They can be used to securely publish your APIs to public use, while securing your Agents and servers by not allowing direct connections to them from the outside. The Gateway Agent accomplishes this by handling the incoming connections, and only directing valid API requests for handling in the Processes on the actual Agents.