Dynamic Agents, what a surprise!

​We often think that the best way to do things is to leave everything as it is. If everything works, it's fine, why change?
Well, unfortunately, this is not always the winning approach!

​Change, evolution and progress can lead to improvements that we could never have if we remain in the mindset of immobility.
Workload Automation is certainly a clear example!
 
Over time, this product has changed a lot, and new features have been added. New technologies have always been introduced to make this software, now a leader in the sector, increasingly innovative and increasingly rich.
What perhaps represents one of the biggest changes and one of the biggest steps towards the future is certainly the introduction of Dynamic Agents. It is now impossible to imagine a Workload Automation environment without dynamic agents. Using a Dynamic Agent compared to a Fault Tolerant Agent (FTA) offers various advantages and benefits, depending on the needs of the workload planning and automation environment.

• Communicates with the Master Domain Manager via HTTP(S).
• Supports automatic registration.
• Natively integrates with cloud and containerized environments.
• Enabled for containerized and hybrid workload.
• Supports the Automation-hub plug-ins
• Supports other integration like Kerberos and CyberArk

Let's take a closer look at all the benefits that can be obtained thanks to the use of a Dynamic Agent.

Elasticity and scalability
Dynamic Agents can be quickly added or removed, allowing for more flexible management of the workload for more flexible and dynamic environments.
They are ideal for cloud or containerized environments where the required capacity can change dynamically.

Compatibility with modern environments
Optimized to integrate workloads on clouds, containers (such as Kubernetes and OpenShift), and hybrid infrastructures.
Supports modern technologies such as Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud Platform via native plug-ins.
 
Easy configuration and management
Does not require complex network configurations like FTAs ​​(for example, opening specific ports).
The Dynamic Agent automatically registers with the Master or a broker.

Lower administrative overhead
Can be deployed via scripts and automations without manual configuration.
Node registration is handled automatically.

Simplified connectivity
Uses HTTP or HTTPS protocols, reducing the need to configure tunnels or VPNs.
Greater compatibility with enterprise firewalls and proxies.

Advanced monitoring
Includes native capabilities for monitoring and tracking jobs through modern interfaces such as the Dynamic Workload Console.
Supports centralized logging and analytics.

Support for specialized workloads
It is designed to handle specialized workloads such as cloud-native applications, big data, and real-time flows.

Comparison
The benefits of using the dynamic agent are truly remarkable, certainly using an FTA allows you to schedule Jobs even in offline mode, however, we are now in times where it is really difficult to have periods of high downtime in which the connection between Master and Agent decays for a long time.
The advantage of having offline scheduling, however, is obtained at the expense of a more complex configuration, the use of a proprietary TCP/IP protocol as well as the impossibility of using the over 100 plug-ins that Workload Automation supports.
In the table below are summarized the characteristics of both types of Agent

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Pasquale Peluso Pasquale is the Workload Automation backend team Leader. He joined HCL in 2019 in the QA team. He works as verification tester for Workload Automation suite on distributed and cloud-native environments. He has a master’s degree in Automation Engineering.