New Power Automate Hosted Process license and hosted RPA latest updates

By Ken Seong Tan

July 26, 2024

Power Automate hosted robotic process automation (RPA) capability provides a simple way for automation center of excellence (CoE) to set up and scale based on RPA workloads. Using Microsoft hosted infrastructure running in Azure, hosted RPA empowers you to manage your RPA workload effectively with two solutions:

Individual hosted machines: enable developers to build, test automation and business users to run automation.
Hosted machine groups: automatically scale workloads to optimize unattended automation in production, delivering improved business process continuity and governance at scale.

Setting up and maintaining RPA infrastructure manually is time consuming. Hosted RPA delivers a consistent setup experience and license for both individual hosted machines and hosted machine groups, making it faster and easier to set up and manage RPA for your organization. Scalable automation is now accessible to everyone from information workers to pro developers to centers of excellence. Manage your costs, optimize your resources, and spend more time focusing on what’s most important to your business with hosted RPA.

Hosted RPA capabilities summary

We are excited to announce the launch of the New Power Automate Hosted Process license. This new offering is set to further simplify the Power Automate licensing for hosted Robotic Process Automation (RPA) capabilities which revolutionize the way businesses automate their processes, providing a more streamlined and efficient approach to automation.

The hosted RPA solution has also received significant updates, enhancing its capabilities and offering more flexibility to users.

New Power Automate Hosted Process license

With the standalone Power Automate Hosted Process, you can build, test and run automation on dedicated hosted machines, and leverage hosted machine groups for auto-scaling and dynamic load balancing in your environment, optimizing resources between processes and teams within the organization.

The new Power Automate Hosted Process license is a superset of the Power Automate Process license with the following key entitlements:

In addition to the Process license entitlement, includes the Microsoft hosted virtual machine running in Azure, which can be used as a dedicated hosted machine or hosted machine group bot
Includes Unattended RPA entitlement to run unattended desktop flows on hosted machines or hosted machine groups
Licenses cloud flow invoking the desktop flow action targeting a hosted machine or hosted machine group, and its associated cloud flows in the same business process

The new Power Automate Hosted Process license replaces the existing Hosted RPA add-on. Customers who have already purchased the existing Hosted RPA add-on will benefit from the updated entitlement.

For more information on Power Automate Hosted Process licensing, please refer to the Power Automate licenses documentation and the Power Automate pricing page.

What’s New in hosted RPA

As we continue to invest in enhancing the hosted RPA capabilities to seamlessly transition all RPA workloads from on-premises to the cloud, we’re excited to share the latest updates in our hosted RPA solution.

Microsoft Entra hybrid join support for hosted machines in Public Preview

Microsoft Entra hybrid join support for hosted machines is now in public preview. This feature allows organizations to join their domain hosted machines to their on-premises Active Directory and Microsoft Entra ID, enabling an efficient integration between on-premises and cloud environments.

For more information on how to configure Microsoft Entra Hybrid join for hosted machines, please refer to the hosted machine documentation.

Enhanced auto-scaling for hosted machine groups

To ensure optimal performance and reliability, we have enhanced the auto-scaling capabilities for hosted machine group. Prior to the enhancements in auto-scaling, users configure a Max Bot for a hosted machine group to define the maximum number of bots that the group can scale to when there are available capacity in the environment. Now, in addition to the existing configuration, we include a Committed Bot setting that guarantees that the number of bots that hosted machine group can scale to, ensuring that they always have the resources they need for their critical automation tasks.

Configure auto-scaling for hosted machine groups

For more information on how to configure committed bots for hosted machine groups, please refer to the Hosted machine groups documentation.

Capacity Utilization Dashboard

To help center of excellence (CoE) and Makers monitor and manage their usage of capacity based licenses in their Power Automate environment, we have introduced the capacity utilization dashboard in public preview. This dashboard provides insights into capacity availability, usage, and management of the capacity based license allocation to machines and machine group within the Power Automate portal. Following are the supported capacity based licenses: