What’s New In Zeebe: BPMN Symbol Support, Zeebe + Apache Kafka, New Conference Talks, and More

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Hi everyone, here’s our roundup of goings-on in and around the Zeebe project for September 2018. This month, we’ll cover newly-supported BPMN symbols in Zeebe, a Zeebe + Apache Kafka demo, conference talk recordings featuring Bernd, and more.

Questions? Comments? Visit the community page to see how you can get in touch with us. We’d be happy to hear from you.

Show me the symbols

Thorben is finishing up work on support for parallel fork and join gateways and embedded subprocesses in preparation for the next Zeebe release, scheduled for October 2018. Along with Philip’s work on intermediate message catch events and receive tasks that we mentioned in last month’s What’s New post, this represents a big step forward in Zeebe’s supported flow logic and opens up many new use cases.

We’ll continue to focus on BPMN symbols throughout Q4 2018, and we’re always looking for input on the symbols that the community considers most important.

CamundaCon 2018 and a new Zeebe demo (Zeebe + Kafka!)

We had a great time at CamundaCon 2018 in Berlin last week, and a highlight for us was presenting a Zeebe live hacking session at the event. This included a new demo from Bernd where Zeebe works alongside Apache Kafka to orchestrate an e-commerce order process. Session recordings will be online in the coming weeks, and in the meanwhile, Bernd’s code from the demo is available here.

If you’re looking for more like this, remember that you can find us at Kafka Summit San Francisco on October 16-17.

And if you’re in Berlin, we’ll be hosting the Berlin Apache Kafka Meetup at Camunda HQ on October 22 (a big thanks to Confluent for organizing).

Grab the popcorn: new conference talks online

Two recent conference talks from Camunda co-founder and workflow extraordinaire Bernd Rücker are online for everyone to see.

If you’d like to learn more about the general problem we’re setting out to solve with Zeebe (plus the associated complexities, plus some live coding examples), we recommend these talks from Bernd.

Complex Event Flows in Distributed Systems (QCon New York, June 2018)

Bernd Ruecker demonstrates how the new generation of lightweight and highly-scalable state machines ease the implementation of long running services. He shares how to handle complex logic and flows which require proper reactions on failures, timeouts and compensating actions and provides guidance backed by code examples to illustrate alternative approaches.

Coordinate Cloud-Native Components Using Distributed State Machines (CloudNative London, September 2018)

Microservices or serverless functions decompose logic into small or even tiny pieces. But how can you implement complex end-to-end use cases (e.g. a customer order) when you have a bunch of nicely decoupled components (e.g. checkout, payment & shipping)? How can you handle the state of long running interactions when building on rather stateless components? And how can you deal with subsequent requirements around timeouts, error handling and consistency respectively long lived distributed transactions? In this talk Bernd will share with you his answers to these questions based on his real-life experience with customer projects. Bernd will not only use slides but also do fun little live hacking sessions using open source components.

Microservices orchestration survey results

If you’re a regular reader of our blog, then you’ve probably already seen our recap of results from this year’s microservices orchestration survey.

But in case you’re just coming across us for the first time, here’s a quick summary: earlier this year, we fielded a survey where we asked members of the Camunda community how they’re approaching microservices architectures: why they’re adopting or not adopting microservices, the tools they’re using to manage their architectures, and the problems they’re encountering along the way.

We’ve analyzed and published the results, and you can view results of our report here. A few highlights:

  • 64% of respondents are using microservices for some (46%) or all (18%) of the applications they’re building; another 28% aren’t yet using microservices in their applications but are considering microservices.
  • 59% say one of the challenges with a microservices architecture is a lack of visibility into end-to-end business processes that span multiple microservices, and 50% cited ambiguous error handling that leads to unaddressed errors at the boundaries between microservices.
  • 64% of microservices adopters say microservices have resulted in improved scalability of applications, and 60% are able to bring new products to market more quickly.
  • 88% of respondents are using REST APIs for communication between microservices, while 46% are using Apache Kafka.

Thanks for reading. We’ll be back with another update soon.

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