Hello Zeebe community! We’re back with a “What’s New” post for August 2018 where we’ll share updates about features in Zeebe, upcoming events where you can meet our team, and other general happenings in the project.
Did You Get the Message?
We’ve invested lots of time this quarter in extending Zeebe’s BPMN support, and Philipp has completed the intermediate message catch event and the receive task. These symbols enable key workflow concepts such as message correlation, making it much easier to integrate Zeebe in an event-driven architecture. We’re really excited about the progress we’ve made here, and we hope that you are too.
Support for these symbols will be included in the next Zeebe release. We’ll be following up with a blog post and other resources detailing how and why you’d use these elements in your orchestration workflow.
They’ll also feature heavily when we present…
Zeebe at Kafka Summit San Francisco – October 16-17, 2018
Members of the Camunda team will head to the West Coast in mid-October for Kafka Summit San Francisco. We’ll have a booth in the exhibitor section, and our very own Bernd Rücker will be delivering a session about how to use Zeebe alongside Kafka called “The Big Picture: Monitoring and Orchestration of Your Microservices Landscape with Kafka and Zeebe”.
Here’s the abstract from Bernd’s talk:
A company’s business processes typically span more than one microservice. In an e-commerce company, for example, a customer order might involve microservices for payments, inventory, shipping and more. Implementing long-running, asynchronous and complex collaboration of distributed microservices is challenging. How can we ensure visibility of cross-microservice flows and provide status and error monitoring? How do we guarantee that overall flows always complete, even if single services fail? Or, how do we at least recognize stuck flows so that we can fix them?
In this talk, I’ll demonstrate an approach based on real-life projects using the open source workflow engine zeebe.io to orchestrate microservices. Zeebe can connect to Kafka to coordinate workflows that span many microservices, providing end-to-end process visibility without violating the principles of loose coupling and service independence. Once an orchestration flow starts, Zeebe ensures that it is eventually carried out, retrying steps upon failure. In a Kafka architecture, Zeebe can easily produce events (or commands) and subscribe to events that will be correlated to workflows. Along the way, Zeebe facilitates monitoring and visibility into the progress and status of orchestration flows. Internally, Zeebe works as a distributed, event-driven and event-sourced system, making it not only very fast but horizontally scalable and fault tolerant—and able to handle the throughput required to operate alongside Kafka in a microservices architecture. Expect not only slides but also fun little live-hacking sessions and real-life stories.
If you’re planning to attend Kafka Summit and want to meet up with our team, you can get in touch with us on Twitter or send an email to [email protected].
Zeebe at CamundaCon Berlin – September 20-21, 2018
Needless to say, Zeebe will make quite a few appearances at CamundaCon 2018 in Berlin, the annual Camunda user conference.
Zeebe-related sessions at CamundaCon include:
- “The Role of Workflows in Microservices”, presented by Bernd Rücker of Camunda
- “Big Workflow in Action: Zeebe Live Hacking”, presented by Daniel Meyer, Felix Müller, and Mike Winters of Camunda
- “Using Zeebe with Spring Boot and Apache Camel”, presented by Jan Galinski of Holisticon AG
There’ll also be ample opportunity to chat with members of the Zeebe team–to ask us questions, to give us feedback, and to generally wax philosophical about the role of workflow automation in cutting-edge software architectures.
We hope to see you there. You can buy passes to CamundaCon via the Camunda website.
New Blog Posts and the Microservices Orchestration Survey
We published three new product-related blog posts in August. First was a 2-part series about BPMN (business process model and notation), a well-established modeling standard that’s used to define workflows in Zeebe and that we believe is the perfect way to express complex flow logic in use cases such as microservices orchestration. You can find the posts here:
- BPMN and Microservices Orchestration, Part 1 of 2: Flow Languages, Engines, and Timeless Patterns
- BPMN and Microservices Orchestration, Part 2 of 2: Graphical Models, Simplified Sagas, and Cross-functional Collaboration
Then we finished the month with a post about “stateful orchestration” and how using a workflow engine makes it easier to take responsibility for errors and failure handling in a microservices architecture:
Lastly, we collected more than 350 responses for the microservices orchestration survey that we ran in July. The results give great insight into how members of the Camunda community are building microservices architectures, and we’ll be sharing a summary of the results in September. Thanks to everyone who participated in the survey.
And that concludes our August 2018 update. If you’d like to stay informed about Zeebe, remember that you can:
We’ll be back with another round of updates next month.
