Installing Automation Suite on EKS/AKS

This page walks you through the high-level installation instructions for Automation Suite on AKS and EKS.

Before you begin, consider the following:

• Kubernetes, AWS, and Azure cloud resources management knowledge is required to deploy and manage Automation Suite on AKS/EKS. If you encounter issues installing and configuring Automation Suite on AKS/EKS, contact UiPath® Professional Services.

• Before choosing your deployment profile, see Deployment scenarios.

• The installation process generates self-signed certificates on your behalf. You should replace them with certificates signed by a trusted Certificate Authority (CA) as soon as installation completes. For instructions, see Managing the certificates.

• Automation Suite on AKS/EKS does not currently support Federal Information Processing Standard 140-2 (FIPS 140-2). If you require FIPS 140-2 for Automation Suite, you can deploy Automation Suite on FIPS 140-2-enabled RHEL machines. For details, see Security and compliance.

Step 1: Provisioning the infrastructure prerequisites

Before installing Automation Suite, you must configure the cloud resources in your environment. This includes:

• AKS or EKS cluster
• Offline only: External OCI-compliant registry
• Object Storage - Azure Blob or Amazon S3
• Block Storage
• File Storage
• Database
• Caching
• Networking (e.g., VNETs / VPC, DNS, subnets, NSGs / security groups, NAT gateway, elastic IP and internet gateway)
• Certificates
• Networking Policies

For instructions on prerequisites, see Requirements.

Optional: Configuring the proxy

If you use a proxy server for internet-facing traffic, you must allow a list of URLs and use the no_proxy settings while configuring the proxy. For instructions on how to configure your proxy, see Configuring the proxy.

Step 2: Configuring the external OCI-compliant registry

In offline installations, you need a registry compliant with OCI (Open Container Initiative) to store the container images and deployment Helm charts.

There are two ways to upload the Automation Suite artifacts to the external OCI-compliant registry:

• Option A: By mirroring your OCI-compliant registry with the UiPath® registry;
• Option B: By hydrating your OCI-compliant registry with the offline bundle.

Step 3: Downloading the software on your client machine

You must install the following software on your management machine. Management machine refers to the machine you use to operate your cluster and that can access your cluster via the kubeconfig file. Your management machine can run Linux, Windows, or MacOS.

The following tools are required to successfully run the prerequisite checks, installation, and post-installation steps on your cluster via the client machine.

Tool	Description	Download
uipathctl	Required. uipathctl is a UiPath® command-line tool that allows you to run commands against Automation Suite Kubernetes hosted on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). You can use uipathctl to check prerequisites in your environment, install Automation Suite, configure and manage it from a single unified CLI. For more information, including a complete list of uipathctl operations, see the uipathctl reference documentation.	Download uipathctl Run uipathctl
versions.json	Required. Needed to perform prerequisite checks and installation steps.	Download versions.json
kubectl	Optional. Ensure that kubectl matches the version of your cluster	Download kubectl

Step 4: Configuring input.json

You must edit the input.json file to provide the required inputs for the uipathctl installer and perform operations such as configuring the SQL connection strings and the UiPath® services you would like to enable.

We provide different input.json template files for AKS and EKS. For instructions on how to configure input.json, see Configuring input.json.

Optionally, you can bring your own components that are part of the Automation Suite stack. For details on the components, see Automation Suite on EKS/AKS stack. For details on how to configure the component you bring, see Bring your own components.

If you perform an offline installation, make sure to configure your external OCI-compliant registry.

To install Automation Suite on EKS/AKS in offline mode, you must take the following additional steps:

• Explicitly set the value of the install_type parameter to offline in the input.json file;

• Configure an external OCI-compliant registry.

Step 5: Accessing your cluster with uipathctl

uipathctl requires access to the KubeAPI Server to perform cluster-level operations such as deployment, resource creation, etc. To access the KubeAPI server, uipathctl uses the kubeconfig file, which contains the admin-level credentials needed to access the cluster. This file must be present in the ~/.kube/config folder (default location) of your local (management) machine.

Optionally, if you are concerned about storing the kubeconfig file in the default location, you can alternatively provide it with help of the --kubeconfig flag during every execution of uipathctl.

For example, you can use your preferred method to update your ~/.kube/config file by using AWS CLI or Azure CLI.

Step 6: Checking the infrastructure prerequisites

Prerequisite checks ensure that the needed cloud infrastructure is provisioned appropriately and is accessible by the client machine before starting the installation of Automation Suite.

The installer can automatically generate the following configurations on your behalf:

• The SQL databases required for the installation on the SQL server based if the sql.create_db key is set in your input.json file.
• The object storage buckets required in your cloud provider if the external_object_storage.create_bucket key is set in the configuration file.

To allow the installer to generate these configurations, run the following command:

uipathctl prereq create input.json --versions versions.json

Important:

The uipathctl prereq create command does not create the required SQL databases for Process Mining. You must manually create them by following the instructions in Bring your own database.

To check the prerequisites based on the inputs you configured in the input.json, run the following command:

uipathctl prereq run input.json --versions versions.json

To check the prerequisites for installation, run uipathctl prereq . By default, the command checks all the prerequisites. However, it also allows you to run strictly the checks that are relevant to you:

• If you want to exclude components from the execution, use the --excluded flag. For example, if you do not want to check the database connection strings, run uipathctl prereq --excluded SQL. The command runs all the prerequisite checks except for the SQL-related one.
• If you want to include only certain components in the execution, use the --included flag. For example, if you only want to check the DNS and objectstore, run uipathctl prereq --included DNS,OBJECTSTORAGE.

Note:

You can find the names of the components you can include or exclude from the prerequisite checks here. In the example, the first word on each outdented line represents the component name. For example: SQL, OBJECTSTORE, DNS, etc.

Important: You may receive a throttling message from AKS, such as Waited for 1.0447523s due to client-side throttling, not priority and fairness. In this case, allow a few minutes for the command to fully complete or try to re-run it.

For an output result example, see Output example: prerequisite check.

Step 7: Installing Automation Suite

Note:

To see which deployment scenarios are available for Automation Suite on AKS/EKS, see Deployment scenarios.

1. After successfully validating the prerequisites, you can proceed to install Automation Suite by running the following command:

   uipathctl manifest apply input.json --versions versions.json

   For an output example, see Output example: Automation Suite installation.
2. To rerun the installation, use the same command as in step 1, with all the arguments and flags.
3. To validate that your installation is successful, and services are healthy, run the following command:

   uipathctl health check

Note:

If you run into issues during installation, see Troubleshooting.