IA Cloud component overview
The article provides a comprehensive overview of the Intelligent Automation Cloud Enterprise (IA Cloud) components, their server deployment, and data flows across them. The figure below illustrates how the components are joined together to form the IA Cloud architecture.
Application level
On the level, IA Cloud comprises such major GUI applications as Control Tower and WorkSpace. In addition to them, the platform features development tools and third-party integration for data logging.
Control Tower
It is a central management web application intended to orchestrate the automation of processes and tasks. It provides a graphical interface for power users, administrators, and developers to accomplish the following tasks:
- Design, run, schedule, and monitor automations and associated workflows
- Handle the input and output data related to automations
- Manage Manual Tasks
- Configure all system components
- View and manage WorkFusion Analytics
- Manage users and roles
To learn more about the component, refer to the Log in to Control Tower topic.
Related components: WorkSpace, Workflow, RPA, AutoML, OCR, File Storage, WorkFusion Studio.
Bot Manager
Via Control Tower, you can also access Bot Manager—a web application that uses Bot Agents on RPA servers to manage RPA units and send commands. It allows the following:
- Manage server processes
- Maintain active RDP sessions
- Monitor hardware utilization and statistics for bots and instances
To learn more about the app, read the Work with Bot Manager topic. To understand how it interacts with other RPA components, refer to the Deploy RPA article.
Related components: Control Tower, RPA, Analytics, Database, Secrets Vault.
WorkSpace
It is a web application that offers a human-in-the-loop experience, allowing human workers to interact effectively with bots. WorkSpace receives input from bots and creates assignments for users. The output is handled further by bots and displayed in Control Tower Analytics.
To learn more about the component, refer to the WorkSpace overview topic.
Related components: Control Tower, Object Storage.
Service level
The service level covers the IA Cloud components that underly WorkFusion GUI applications and enable the execution of the automations and processes launched from these apps and supporting interactions across the platform levels.
AutoML
The AutoML component finds the best Machine Learning model for a particular target function expressed in a Manual Task, trains and validates it, and finally predicts the target variables.
To learn more about the component, refer to the What can AutoML do topic.
Related components: WorkFusion Studio, Control Tower, Object Storage.
RPA
The RPA (Robotic Process Automation) Cluster is a scalable computing environment responsible for automating user scenarios within desktop or web applications.
To learn more about the RPA technology, refer to the View automation technology classification topic.
Related components: WorkFusion Studio, Control Tower.
OCR
The OCR (Optical Character Recognition) engine processes scanned documents converting unstructured, image-based data into structured-character documents in several formats, such as HTML, XML.
To learn more about the OCR usage, read the Tune OCR Business Process topic.
Related components: WorkFusion Studio, Control Tower, WorkSpace, Object Storage.
Workflow
Workflow Engine executes automation processes authored in Control Tower according to the process definitions. This is a server application configured within Control Tower. Execution is handled in different computing environments—RPA, WorkSpace, OCR, and AutoML.
Related components: Control Tower, RPA, WorkSpace, AutoML.
Analytics
WorkFusion Analytics offers a comprehensive collection of dashboards that aggregate and display metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs).
To learn more about the component, refer to the Analytics topic.
Related components: Control Tower, WorkSpace.
BEP
Bot Execution Platform (BEP) is a platform that creates tasks, submits them to queues, routes to isolated BEP Workers, and receives the task performance results.
Control Tower sends Tasks to BEP. BEP Master arranges tasks in a queue, and BEP Task Dispatcher dynamically allocates Agent servers' resources, invoking Workers to perform each task. After the task is completed, its results are returned to Control Tower. If the task fails, it is returned to the queue.
Related components: Control Tower, AutoML, Workflow, RPA.
Data Level
The data level comprises components used for storing and managing data used across the IA Cloud, including sensitive information, such as passwords, access tokens, and so on.
Database
WorkFusion uses MS SQL as its database server. MS SQL Server stores Business Process definitions, as well as runtime and tracking information on their executions, including RPA and AutoML, and supplies these data as requested by other software applications.
Related components: Control Tower, WorkSpace, Analytics.
Secrets Vault
It is secure storage for sensitive data.
To learn more about the component, refer to the Set up Secrets Vault topic.
Related components: Control Tower, RPA.
Object Storage
It is reliable storage for OCR results and trained AutoML models. It keeps binary file type content, such as OCR results, AutoML models, screenshots, and reports generated by automations.
Related components: WorkFusion Studio, Workflow, OCR, AutoML.
Data flow across IA Cloud components
The figure below illustrates in a simplified way how users interact with IA Cloud components and how data move across them.
The digits in the diagram above correspond to the following descriptions:
A business user launches or schedules a Business Process via Control Tower (CT).
CT sends Bot Tasks to BEP for execution.
BEP sends tasks that require the usage of the RPA functionality, such as accessing underlying applications (SAP, Outlook, so on), to RPA bots for execution.
The OCR server digitalizes documents retrieved by RPA bots—that means, converts them into the XML format for further processing. AutoML downloads the model required for the task and consumes the digitalized document to predict the output.
If any attribute in the document requires validation by a worker or a Subject Matter Expert (SME), the document is sent to WorkSpace.
In WorkSpace, SMEs validate or extract data from the document. WorkSpace submits the validated or processed documents back to CT.
CT, BEP, AutoML, OCR, RPA, and WorkSpace components use the data layer—Secrets Vault, MS SQL Server, File Storage—for data and secret storage and retrieval.
Data logging
For logging and monitoring, IA Cloud uses the ELK stack—Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana.
For more information, refer to the Monitoring overview article.
Development tools
To facilitate the design of automations, WorkFusion offers special development tools:
Server deployment
IA Cloud installation requires a minimum of eight servers to host all of its components. For server deployment details, refer to the Deployment diagram.