CamundaCon Berlin 2024 Day 2 Live Blog

Welcome to day 2 of CamundaCon Berlin 2024!

We hope you’re as excited as we are for CamundaCon Berlin 2024, which starts today! After an incredible day 1, day 2 of the conference starts today. We’ll again be bringing you the latest updates from the event live as they’re happening. Be sure to check back often as we’ll be updating this post throughout the day.

We’ve officially sold out the venue, but if you couldn’t join in person in Berlin, you can still catch all the sessions online for free (that’s what I’m doing!) Just register at the link below, check out the agenda and make sure you don’t miss a thing. We’ll see you there, whether online or in person!

Update: Did you miss CamundaCon Berlin 2024, or just want to check out the sessions you couldn’t catch live? All replays are now available at the link below!

Morning run with Bernd

Did you join in on the morning run in Berlin this morning? Check out some pictures over on LinkedIn of our intrepid runners and share your own thoughts!

Here with us before the opening keynote? There is again a sneak preview behind the scenes to get you ready, touching on the Hackday results and more, led by our own Senior Developer Advocate Niall Deehan.

Almost time!

We’ll be starting in just a few minutes! People are taking their seats and getting ready for the opening keynote to begin.

Welcome

Mary once again formally opened the conference day from the main stage. After a brief reminder about the the Selfie Screen (tag your selfies with #camundacon and #selfie to join!), and the recordings soon to be ready (because nobody could be at all 4 tracks and 46 sessions!). Mary highlighted the on-site streaming options provided for overflow viewing for the sold out crowd (over 750 in person, plus over 2300 online!), including the streaming boat available to all. Mary also introduced our AMA and sponsor booths, as well as Speed Networking opportunities.

She then welcomed Camunda co-founder and Chief Technologist Bernd Reucker and Camunda CTO Daniel Meyer to the stage.

Opening Keynote by Bernd Reucker and Daniel Meyer

Bernd and Daniel took the stage and Daniel opened by asking an essentially rhetorical question: Is transformation optional? Of course, it’s not right? Organizations need to transform and grow regularly in order to thrive, but there are a few things holding many companies back.

One is the status quo bias. Why change? Aren’t things working now? The answer to that is, unfortunately, often no. Change is necessary, because processes fail for many reasons. Maybe regulations change, maybe you are merging with another bank and need to combine processes and systems, maybe the business environment changes. For one reason or another, processes need to be versatile and robust, because when processes fail, it’s very costly, as you can see in the slide below.

Another is what Daniel called the “shortcut bias.” Can’t we just get to the end quickly? But when you try to do this, by for example buying a product off the shelf that claims to have everything pre-built for you, it’s never as easy as you think. The pre-built functionality may not match up with your existing infrastructure, and customizations are challenging. The shortcut approach, much like the “point solutions” Jakob mentioned yesterday, appears to be a quick win but very soon becomes a complicated drag on innovation.

Camunda’s goal is to provide the best of both worlds by being composable and flexible. It makes it easy to integrate everything you already have, to build new things with our out-of-the-box capabilities, and to work with any future tools or infrastructure that you will use later.

Bernd then joined and led off with a live demo combining a form with a process model for a free trial that could be rapidly deployed and monitored through Operate. After building the demo and running it through Camunda SaaS, Bernd benchmarked it for performance—all live from the stage.

Bernd went on to talk about how you can understand process complexity and involve more teams. How can citizen developers, low-code developers, and pro-code developers work together on the right processes and be enabled for speed? Process orchestration maturity, as Bernd noted, is a journey. A Center of Excellence can often play a key role here.

Bernd (along with Leon Strauch) actually just published a book, “Enterprise Process Orchestration,” that is available to lucky in-person attendees to get signed at the next coffee break, that covers all of this in more detail.

Daniel took back over to talk about the future of AI in process orchestration. He warned that you can’t just rely on AI to “clean everything up for you” and avoid the hard work of transformation. AI is an incredible tool that can be integrated into your processes today, from form generation to our Connectors to numerous AI tools to the new BPMN co-pilot and much more. It was a really exciting overview of what AI can do today and the right way to implement it going forward. Daniel recommended anyone looking to learn more about it sign up for an upcoming webinar next week, May 22nd.

Keynote with Sarah Hsu

Next up, Sarah Hsu, Course Chair at Green Software Foundation, came onto the main stage to tell us a story we have heard before. It was about Henry Ford’s assembly line, and the way it transformed manufacturing and in fact the world. She drew the analogy to modern software development, with DevOps as the modern assembly line that transforms development into something that can be accomplished rapidly and efficiently. But how can these stretched development teams incorporate sustainability into their work?

The answer is by developing “Green Software,” which means carbon-efficient. How can one achieve carbon efficiency? There are three options. Energy efficiency, hardware efficiency and carbon awareness.

Sarah explained how the concept of “FinOps” can help us ensure that we optimize the way we use our development resources, particularly cloud costs, so that we “don’t drive a truck when a scooter will do.” Minimizing these expenses is both good for the bottom line and the environment. Just like DevOps revolutionized development, FinOps can make a huge difference in the way we approach software development. But it’s not about cutting corners in development—it’s about maximizing value and efficiency by understanding what the true development and financial costs are and optimizing them.

Sarah next introduced the concept of “GreenOps” to produce a sustainable solution for busy engineering teams. Essentially, GreenOps = Green DevOps, and in Sarah’s opinion, “FinOps and GreenOps are like sisters from another mother.” Financial and environmental optimization can work hand in hand.

An example of how this can be work is Generali Switzerland—check out this real-world example of focusing on efficiency to save costs in a highly regulated environment.

Like Bernd, Sarah also has a book coming out, “Building Green Software,” that lucky in-person attendees will be able to pick up and have signed during the coffee break. Don’t miss your chance!

Overall this was a great talk about how financial and environmental priorities, which are often seen as competing against each other, can really work together. It just makes sense, right? Let’s make this better understood and make our processes and development more efficient.

Hackday Presentations

Next up, I headed over the the Lightning Talks to see the results of earlier conference Hackday. The two challenges were to either:

• Make a model as overengineered as possible and still work
• Create an educational BPMN story

Despite the usual joy of live demos (with the screen at one point zooming in quite close on Niall’s secret Plan to Take Over the World 🤔), this was a fun session with a lot of creativity on display. I certainly learned a thing or two about what’s possible using Camunda and BPMN, and it was clear the community members and teams involved had a good time with the challenge.

Hackday presentations included:

• A complicated process to learn a fact about cats
• Anna and Betty’s date story (a charming interactive story told through BPMN, pictured above)
• An invoice processing and approval example
• Compensation Commando: An interactive BPMN tutorial teaching the best way to use Compensation events
• A thorough model to assemble a dating profile (including a tense moment of wondering whether the date will succeed)
• Another interesting take on assembling a dating profile (interesting to see the variations!)
• A quite convoluted process to invite someone to a birthday party, including an interactive poll to determine the crowd’s favorite ice cream flavor

The winning teams—Compensation Commando and birthday party invitation—won themselves free hats! What were your favorites?

Maestro! One story of conducting business through orchestration

Nichola Todd, a senior VP of technology at First American, opened her talk on the Main Stage with a crowd selfie and then immediately said, “I will not be talking about technology today.”

Instead, she says she’ll be talking about how First American handles 135 years of data in their workflows, particularly by consuming technology that already exists rather than creating it themselves.

Camunda was a trusted platform and a familiar name to handle these requirements. In 2022, they went onto the Enterprise plan and rolled off of about three more legacy platforms. “This was a huge change management shift,” Todd says. “We went from heavy engineering reliance to engineering not be as necessary.”

Monitoring in Camunda was huge for these changes. “These are not technical folks monitoring these workflows,” Todd says, thanks to Camunda configurability.

“The business is writing their own workflows based on features we have available today,” she adds, moving toward their goal of consuming technology rather than creating it. In Q1, 155 million decisions are made without requiring human intervention. “We are enabling the business what they need to do in a very timely way.”

Nobody became a reviewer to click buttons, she says, so this automation sets team members free to work on complex, unique, creative tasks.

By using the same BPMN tool across the organization, semantics confusion is gone from business-needs conversation. “My business cohort can advocate for me just as well as I can advocate for them because we’re all speaking the same language,” Todd says.

That’s when you know you’ve made the jump, she says during her wrap-up, when you’re no longer pushing a tool on the business. “It’s being pulled into other areas.”

Other sessions not to miss

• Introducing Camunda to a BaFin-regulated bank: Andrej Grimm, head of process excellence at the independent financial group ODDO BHF, joins Jörg Zentgraf, head of smart automation at business management consultancy ilum Informatik AG, to discuss a growing need in banking compliance—it’s becoming more critical that European financial institutions to focus on security and data protection, rather than just business processes. Strict compliance requirements can be tough to navigate for financial businesses, but Grimm and Zentgraft walk the audience through how these affect their architecture and operating model.
• How to use Camunda Modeler to move from simple BPMNs to executable processes: How can you move from a descriptive process model to an executable one that is still easy to understand and works perfectly? Join Felix Carrier, Principal Software Developer at National Bank of Canada, for this exciting Modeler-intensive session that goes through an example and outlines the steps you need to make the jump from descriptive to executable.

Excellence unveiled: Navigating success in process automation – A Center of Excellence panel

Up next I headed (well, clicked) over to the main stage, where Senior Customer Success Manager Francesca Vismara at Camunda was moderating a panel on Centers of Excellence (CoE). She was joined by Business Consultant Michael Rehfisch of Norddeutsche Landesbank, Solution Manager Souhaila Jeddi of Desjardins, BPM Expert Srikanth Tiyyagura of SDC and Camunda’s Chief Technologist and co-founder Bernd Ruecker.

Bernd was asked how common he thought CoEs were in the industry. They are “probably the most successful pattern I see,” he noted, including some form of central governance and enablement. He added that for true empowerment you really need buy-in, particularly from the C-level. If you don’t get it, “it’s a lot of chaos,” with duplicated work, lack of best practices, repeated vendor selection, and other issues.

Michael talked about how the CoE at his organization worked to create a blueprint for a project that can be easily started and run, getting over the early challenges of people trying to conform their processes to the right initial standards and requirements. His team focuses on starting with MVPs and Lighthouse projects but doesn’t implement directly.

Srikanth then discussed the importance of bringing everyone together and fostering collaboration. A fascinating challenge is aligning all the many departments of his company while still prioritizing reusability and scalability? He spoke to the collaboration and distinctions between a CoE, a CoE Advisory Team and a Community of Practice in his organization.

Souhaila explained how the goal of her CoE is to make IT teams more autonomous in process automation. They created accelerators and blueprints to make development faster and more compliant. But they also provided training for BPMN, Camunda, etc., along with promoting Camunda Academy, which hundreds of employees have trained on. The emphasis is on providing support to help make other teams more independent. Bernd highlighted that he appreciated how their CoE helps teams build a business case and then teaches self-service to get buy-in and then avoid bottlenecks.

The panelists called out communication, change management, enablement, empowerment and scaled adoption as key concepts to keep in mind when building your CoE. Check out this full session for some great Center of Excellence insights, including a lot of great Q&A at the end.

Rethinking the process creation journey & adaptation

JIT has been making use of business process automation since 2013, which means they’re familiar as a company with the challenges of the BPMN iceberg. “So let’s make this an easier and more enjoyable journey for you,” says Maximilian Kamenicky, senior developer at JIT.

BPMN promises a handful of benefits, but sometimes they aren’t easily delivered. “BPMN does sometimes create complexity,” Kamenicky notes. “If you don’t know what you’re doing, it can be hard to read the process.” There can also be multiple ways to reach the same goal, which can create confusion.

Kamenicky proposes that a business should always emphasize the goal.

“BPMN helps us talk about perspective differences, but we need to talk,” Kamenicky says. He offers tips for how to communicate and address priorities for teams in business, solutions, development, and testing. For example, always make it easy to collaborate. Avoid creating silos and black boxes, especially for development teams. “End-to-end orchestration is a team sport.”

Elevating Connector quality: How to master the Marketplace

“Quality is never an accident,” says Stefan Schultz, a principal engineer at Consid. His lightning talk for today describes how to ensure quality for Connectors in Camunda’s Marketplace.

There are currently some basic requirements for partner Connectors on the Marketplace, like being open source and having at least one README.

However, 53% of Connectors haven’t been touched since 2023. “You can get an idea of quality from activity in the repo,” Schultz says. Other issues, like no contact info or missing documentation, can also be indicators of poor quality.

The perfect Connector should be well tested, safe to use, and well documented. “Low-code Connector development is actually pro-code software development!” Schultz notes. He encourages Connector creators to consider themselves as more like product owners. “It is your responsibility to take care of this Connector that you have brought in.” Your Connector is also like a business card, telling fellow professionals who you are and what you’re capable of.

To ensure Connector quality, Schultz had calls to action for both developers and customers—ensuring documentation for the one, checking details for the other, and so on.

Other sessions not to miss

• You can have both: Deploy fast and run safely: This presentation goes in depth into ONE’s process orchestration journey. Nicolas Homble from ONE will take you through the way process orchestration expanded from one use case to many. You’ll get to know their SDLC, how they integrate with CI/CD, enhancements to the modeling and development experience and more. Get some great takeaways on how to become more efficient and successful with Camunda.
• The State of performance: Challenging workload demands for the Zeebe engine keeps Camunda engineers on their toes. Falko Menge, senior principal solution architect at Camunda, explains today on the Purple Stage that users are always looking for new ways to push the limits of how many process instances Zeebe can execute. Menge demonstrates how the consulting team at Camunda use benchmarks and tuning tools to simulate real-world workloads.

Coffee Break and Book Signing

Next up is a coffee break! More fresh joe for our in-person attendees ☕. Another perk of being there in person is the book signing of both Bernd and Leon’s new book as well as Sarah Hsu’s. Unfortunately we can’t sign your book virtually, but we can at least provide you with this image of the cover (and isn’t that almost as good? No, no it’s not even close. I know. Sorry.).

While folks are enjoying their caffeine, Senior Community Manager Maria Alcantara spent a few minutes talking with some of our Camunda Champions about their talks, their travel, and what they think of the conference so far. She also headed over to the signing booth to speak with Leon about his new book, who also mentioned that you can now pick it up on Amazon (so it turns out we can do better than an image, in case you were curious 😉).

From pro-code to no-code, your Camunda SaaS low-code survival guide

Rob Parker, Head of Engineering & Architecture at AngleFinance, then presented on the main stage about the challenges, as well as the necessity, of low-code development. He talked about the thousands of processes and notifications they had developed and automated in their own business all using Camunda SaaS out of the box, FEEL and APIs.

There was no advanced IDE, no CI/CD pipeline, no sophisticated version control (beyond milestones in Modeler). They accomplished a great deal this way, but there were some limitations. Rob took us through some of these, including the critical need for standards and conventions to align development teams. Initially, process names, variables and model versions would proliferate. It became challenging for developers to search for and find whatever they were looking for. Thoughtful standardization helped to resolve this and boost productivity.

Connectors are also crucial to low-code development, but Rob talked about the difficulty of environment management on SaaS when compared to traditional development. How did his team solve for the lack of environment variables? They learned that by employing secrets, you can accomplish a lot of the same goals of environment management. Yet there was still a limitation, where email and SMS Connectors could not employ secrets this way. Again though, there was a solution, which was to create a “utility subprocess” that encodes environment-specific behavior in separate subprocesses.

There were a few other use cases, including document processing, batch processing, multi-instance inline subprocesses, operational errors… too many to list everything out here. It’s quite a sophisticated operation even in a “low-code” environment and, as Rob points out, needs an “engineering mindset” to do right. Be sure to check out this engaging talk from Rob that is brimming with solutions to your low-code challenges and can help you develop an effective low-code strategy while achieving a high degree of low-code sophistication.

Athlon: Roadmap to hyperautomation and beyond

“If you start right, you remove half the work,” says John Li, cofounder of MyCubes and solution architect at Athlon. When Athlon was acquired by Daimler (which owns Mercedez-Benz), the company received a new strategic roadmap to help grow the mobility industry. To begin moving along the roadmap, they implemented a pilot project for creating new process applications.

They started small, Li explains, to ensure that it wasn’t too long before they saw their first successes. “It also needs to be important and urgent,” he says, to ensure buy-in from other teams. In this case, Athlon’s pilot project was replace BizTalk, a business automation solution, rather than extending the license. Rolling the project out over 4 countries in 4 months kept things small enough and fast enough, ensuring success for the project.

With infrastructure in place, Athlon could roll out a larger lighthouse project. “All of upper management was looking at this one.”

Eventually, it was time for a more broad-scale transformation with a central portal, rather than having decentralized infrastructure that was getting quite cramped and costly.

Rutger van Dijk, implementation lead at Athlon, takes over the last half of the presentation with a live demo. Dijk walks the audience through a credit assessment portal that leverages Athlon’s process transparency and centralized infrastructure. “The portal fully supports Camunda 8, just as it was Camunda 7,” Dijk adds. “But the user interface will stay exactly the same.”

Other sessions not to miss

• Best practices & architectural patterns from the Camunda Community: A small panel with Peter Queteschiner, managing director of Phactum Softwareentwicklung; Simon Zambrovski, BPM crafter at Holisticon; and Dominik Horn, cofounder of Miragon GmbH offers straightforward advice for best practices and architectural patterns from their personal experiences within the Camunda community.
• Book signing: At this time, book signing was ongoing. Not really a session, but if you’re around and haven’t checked it out yet, now is your last chance!

Digital transformation and business process automation for banks

Banks have a number of challenges when it comes to evolving and truly bringing about digital transformation, but even more reasons to begin the process. From increased customer satisfaction to improved compliance with regulations and increased agility, digital transformation has tremendous potential to improve the way a bank operates and the success they can have in the marketplace.

Anna Ivanova from UKRSIBBANK and Liudmila Pidgorna, Head of Software Development Department from Integrity Vision, covered a lot of the problems digital transformation can solve, including a long time to market, outdated systems, lack of standardization and lots of manual work and mistakes.

Ana and Liudmila took us through examples of organizations that had dozens or hundreds of steps, many of which were not tracked and the vast majority of which were not automated. They explained how they resolved many key process issues within legacy environments, with Camunda at the center, including by redesigning processes, automating human workflows, improving tracking and communication, and more.

This was not a quick and easy project—it took planning and careful development for over a year to reimagine and reimplement these mission-critical processes, but the payoff will be more than worth it. Goals for just this year include automating 20% of sales (from none today), reducing time to money to 12 days from 28, increasing client satisfaction, and integrating new products into Camunda at a faster clip.

Check out this talk for a great overview of how a team took a holistic and deliberate approach to digitally transforming key financial processes, including an interactive poll about what the audience saw as their own biggest transformation pain points.

How Camunda ignited a revolution in city services

Ricardo Machado, head of engineering and development at Porto Digital, takes the first half of the presentation to discuss CityFlow, a city platform they’ve been working on for the past three years for the benefit of Porto, the second-largest city in Portugal. “If you haven’t visited yet, you should. It’s one of the best cities in Europe,” Machado says.

CityFlow makes use of BPMN 2.0 in an attempt to move toward an ecosystem rather than siloed processes within Porto’s city hall. BPMN also facilitates change management—remember, elected officials using the system are voted in and out. It must be easy to introduce the city hall systems to new users.

“Every gardener has a specific way of doing their jobs. The kennels have their ways of handling cats and dogs,” notes Hugo Magalhães, founder at Helppier. All of those processes in different departments can happen within CityFlow. The touch-screen user interface is built for low-tech users, so that city staff in any department with any job can easily make use of the portal.

“I think we’re the only demonstration to show cats and dogs today,” says Magalhães with a smile. “So that’s really cool.”

But CityFlow is not just a platform for internal use. “Users are of course staff, but also citizens. Never forget the citizen!” Machado says. For example, citizens can use the Issue Report feature to request resolutions to public space safety issues, for example. The Citizen Portal enables intake of requests for municipal service requests. OpenData gives citizens immediate, free access to certain datasets of the city.

Integration with Camunda reduces the need to ask every department how they handle their processes. “Camunda is helping us get rid of paperwork,” Machado says. It also helps city hall efficiently make use of its human resources, a scarce commodity in Porto.

The ubiquity of CityFlow across all city hall departments facilitates staff transfer across departments, as well. Data collected in the platform per employee can be easily used to justify a promotion rather than just I like that guy. Machado points at someone in the audience. “He’s laughing. He must be from the public sector.”

Machado wraps up the presentation by announcing that CityFlow will be open source until the end of 2024. “Join us, and if any city wants to try it, start with a small pilot and let it grow.”

Other sessions not to miss

• Orchestrating realtime data and pushing the limits: A journey in logistics: Markus Seim, Senior Manager PM eCommerce, and Lutz Kerwien, Business Specialist from GLS IT Services, explain how they introduced Camunda 8 SaaS into a legacy system at a major logistics company, which processes data in real time and manages millions of events per day. Take a look to see how Markus and Lutz have turned these challenges into opportunities to unlock greater efficiency.
• Drinking our own Champagne: Chaos Experiments with Zeebe against Zeebe: For the final lightning talk of CamundaCon 2024, Camunda’s own Christopher Kujawa, a senior engineer, explains how Camunda automates and orchestrates chaos experiments using Zeebe against Zeebe. Chaos toolkit, zbchaos, has seen significant improvements since its hackday creation a couple years ago, including BPMN models and more experiments.

Revolutionizing inline inspections: Machine learning meets Camunda 8

Mario Micudaj from Viadee and Jannes Bruns from ROSEN Group took the main stage for our last session of the day to talk about how they incorporate machine learning into their business processes using Camunda 8. Jannes explained that one of ROSEN’s key services is inspection services for pipelines—a critical service to maintain this infrastructure and make sure there are no damaging leaks into the environment.

ROSEN has sensors on pipelines that monitor status and transmit that data back to data scientists, which requires painstaking manual work to identify anomalies meter by meter. How can machine learning enhance their work?

Mario described how he handled the challenge of integrating Camunda with Kubeflow, which uses Python. Mario researched and selected pyzeebe, developed by the Camunda community, to facilitate the integration and enable job workers. It took some work, but they were able to fork this community project and customize it to their needs.

However, they came to realize that a Connector might serve their needs even better than a job worker, and be easier to maintain long term. So the Kubeflow Connector was born.

Jannes concluded by noting that with this Connector, ROSEN will begin to bring prediction scoring into production to locate defects more accurately. They will also migrate more of the job workers over to the Kubeflow Connector and introduce Camunda 8 to more business processes going forward.

Be sure to watch this one for a fascinating look at how Camunda can be flexibly integrated with a machine learning system to solve an important business problem.

Migration path from Camunda 7 to Camunda 8

The Deutsche Bahn is the state-owned railway in Germany, which consists of passenger transport, freight transport, and infrastructure. “In nearly all of these areas, you’ll find Camunda,” says Alexander Petioky, IT architect of DB Systel GmbH. He’s currently figuring out how to fully migrate several standalone applications from Camunda 7 to Camunda 8.

“Life is a b,” Petioky says, admitting that the success story he wanted to talk about today is more of an in-between story still. “So here’s what to consider on your journey from C7 to C8.”

The first stop, he explains, is migration of the models. Instead of one big step (decoupling database connection and moving to C8), Deutsche Bahn is attempting to decouple yet stay on C7 while other bumps get ironed out. Other difficulties include the requirement that Deutsch Bahn’s clusters must be self-managed; they have to be on-premises. That means container, Kubernetes, and Helm experience is required on the team.

Fortunately, he’s found inspiration for potential solutions through other presentations at CamundaCon 2024—for example, deployment via milestones, as suggested in Bernd Rücker’s keynote earlier today.

Petioky is still weighing how exactly to finish the migration from C7 to C8. One of the options he’s considering is step by step (ie, running C7 and C8 in parallel) for larger applications, and then Big Bang for smaller, less critical applications. “With every new release, we pray,” Petioky says with a laugh. “I’m the customer, I can say this. Oleg is busy with us,” he adds, referring to his customer success agent.

Thank you and see you in the fall!

It’s been a blast, but now it’s time for all of us to say goodbye. Thank you for attending, whether online or in person, and for sharing your beautiful #selfies.

This fall we’re holding another CamundaCon 2024 event, with the next one in New York City on October 16-17. After that, don’t miss the first CamundaCon of 2025 in Amsterdam!

Look out for the replays of CamundaCon Berlin 2024 to be available as soon as next week, and can’t wait to see you this fall at CamundaCon NYC 2024!

Update: Did you miss CamundaCon Berlin 2024, or just want to check out the sessions you couldn’t catch live? All replays are now available at the link below!