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Setup Power Automate Desktop on AWS VM

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Posted on by hkhan1308

Hi Everyone,

I am looking to suggest one of my clients to go with Power Automate Desktop for an attended bot that they want. They have AWS VM's where the bot will be setup. I was going over the pre-requisites for the installation which are as follows:

A device that runs Windows 10 Home, Windows 10 Pro, Windows 10 Enterprise, Windows Server 2016, or Windows Server 2019. ARM devices are not supported.

Minimum hardware
- Storage: 1GB
- RAM: 2GB
Recommended hardware
- Storage: 2GB
- RAM: 4GB
.NET Framework 4.7.2 or later

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-automate/desktop-flows/setup

I could not find anywhere whether power automate desktop can be run on AWS VMs (running on EC2 or EC3). Is it possible? Is there a document that can help me out? I just want to confirm this before I can even suggest to the client to go with power automate desktop

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Power Automate Desktop

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fraenK 2,125 on at

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An attended bot within a VM, are you sure? The desktop session has to be unlocked by a human to be able to run the bot. Attended bots typically run on existing machines which are used by employees.
Choosing the right VM environment depends more on the management, process/computing, business application and utilization/scaling requirements rather than the runtime environment.
hkhan1308 6 on at

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Yes, an attended bot within a VM.....trying to be cost effective I believe. As per your reply can I safely infer Power Automate Desktop can be set on an AWS VM?
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fraenK 2,125 on at

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If the VM environment meets the setup requirements of PAD, then PAD can be installed. But that doesn't mean you can automate the whatever business process, which is the most important part, because those requirements are unknown. And running an attended bot within a VM is not cost effective, because it adds cost due to additional and unnecessary infrastructure and manual intervention. Typically, you spin-up cloud VMs for running unattended bots on scale or by demand/utilization, automatically.
hkhan1308 6 on at

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Thank you so much for the reply and feedback. It does make sense to have a server rather than a VM or to go for unattended bot.

Requirements are still being worked on but some basic ones are:

On click or as scheduled, a bot will start working.
Bot to look for a file in a specified location
If the file exists, bot will read the rows in the file.
Bot will open a .exe file
Bot will navigate to a screen and look for a record
Bot will click a button to open a new window
Bot will enter a data it read from the file
Save the data
Repeat from step 5 again till all rows have been processed
Delete the file
fraenK 2,125 on at

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If there is no human intervention required, then this is a typical process to be executed by an unattended bot. You can deploy it on an existing server or a VM and run it 24h or on demand triggered through cloud flows. Otherwise a user would have to start the process manually or let it run scheduled through cloud flows on his/her machine while the user watches the execution (not recommended).