To ensure your work resources remain thread-safe, follow these best practices:

• Instead of agents, use job schedulers and queue processors for all new development. Agent rules are no longer being actively developed; queue processor rules replace standard agents. For best performance and maintainability, replace agents with queue processor rules. For more information, see Using job schedulers and queue processors instead of agents.
• For advanced agents, ensure that any custom actions are thread-safe or specify that the agent runs only on one node at a time. For more information, see Avoiding race conditions for advanced agents. For more information about client-required post-upgrade steps in Pega Cloud services environments, see Post-upgrade tasks following Pega Platform upgrades (7.x to 8.x).
• For Pega Cloud services environments: Associate resources with node types rather than with specific node names or node IDs; associating a resource with a node ID can cause the resource to stop unexpectedly when the node is replaced, for example, due to a health check failure.
• For on-premises environments:
  • To apply one or more node types to a node, use the JVM argument -DNodeTypes. For more information, see Assigning node types to nodes for on-premises environments.
  • To ensure system availability in the event that a node goes down unexpectedly, assign the same node type to multiple node instances.
  • Associate resources with node types rather than with specific node names or node IDs; this avoids resource failure if a node fails or you stop a node for maintenance.