It’s time for the second edition of “What’s New In Zeebe”, where we share an update of what we’re working on in between releases plus other news from the project.
Message Correlation
Daniel and Philipp kicked off a message correlation prototype at the beginning of this week and have made fast progress. Message correlation is a key enabling feature for Zeebe, making it possible to ingest events based on “type” (e.g. ORDER_CANCELLED), “key” (e.g. ORDER_ID), and payload so that BPMN workflows can then react to these events. Message correlation means Zeebe can support more complex (and importantly, more realistic) workflows, which paves the way for many new use cases.
BPMN Symbol Coverage
Though Zeebe’s BPMN symbol coverage is relatively limited right now, in the long run, Zeebe plans to support all BPMN symbols that make sense for core Zeebe use cases. Thorben is working on prototypes for a variety of commonly-requested BPMN constructs, including intermediate message events, boundary events, parallel gateways, and embedded subprocesses.
New Community Clients
Chris released a first version of a C# client for Zeebe that’s based on Zeebe 0.10.0 and uses libzbc, an FFI library that makes it easy to build new Zeebe clients. A Ruby client prototype from Nicolas was added to the Zeebe repository, too.
And Philipp released a first version of a Zeebe worker for HTTP calls that’s based on the Go client.
Running a Zeebe Cluster on AWS
Last week, we published a blog post detailing how Zeebe scales horizontally, and we shared results from one of the benchmarks we run internally (spoiler: Zeebe scales to more than 1 million workflow instances started per second).
We decided that anyone should be able to run these benchmarks themselves, and so Felix published a repository with step-by-step instructions for starting a Zeebe cluster on AWS (complete with scripts that make the process fast and easy) and for using open-source tools like Prometheus and Grafana to visualize Zeebe metrics.
Even if you’re not interested in the benchmarks, this is a simple way to start running Zeebe in a cloud environment. Take a look and let us know if you have any questions along the way.
Zeebe Community Projects
Zeebe is an open-source project, and it’s our aim to build a community of contributors who extend Zeebe’s functionality. Many such “community projects” for Zeebe already exist, but we realized they’re not always easy to find and get involved with.
And so we’ve added a list of community projects to the Community page along with links to the repos where you can learn more.
At the time of writing, the list includes:
- Ruby and C# clients
- Zeebe Modeler (a desktop BPMN modeler for Zeebe)
- Zeebe Simple Monitor (an operations and monitoring tool for Zeebe)
- Zeebe Worker App (for creating and running Node.js workers on the fly)
- Spring Boot integration
- Zeebe job worker for DMN
- Zeebe job worker for making HTTP calls
- Apache Camel routing for Zeebe clients
One note: these projects are maintained by the community and aren’t officially supported by the Zeebe team, and they don’t come with any guarantees.
A New “What Is Zeebe?” Write-up
Zeebe is still a relatively young project, and we assume that many people who come to the Zeebe website are still figuring out what Zeebe does. And some potential users might be new to microservices orchestration or to workflow engines, too.
To help explain the problem that Zeebe solves, how it solves the problem, and why it’s well-suited to solve the problem, we published a new “What Is Zeebe?” writeup. It’s relatively long, but we think it’s efficient way for a newcomer to get a complete picture of Zeebe.
Let us know if you have any feedback. We want to make sure it’s easy for new users to learn about Zeebe and to understand how it can help them solve their problems. We welcome ideas for how we can do a better job here.
As always, if you have questions for the Zeebe team or would like to get involved in the project, we’d love to hear from you. Head on over to the Community page, where you can find information about how to get in touch with us via our public forum or Slack channel.
You can also find us on Twitter or subscribe to our newsletter, which we send about once each month to announce Zeebe releases or other big news.
