Announcing the Zeebe 0.17 Release

The Zeebe team is happy to announce the 0.17 release. You can download Zeebe 0.17 from the release page on GitHub.

In this post, we’ll discuss some of the highlights from the release and share other project updates.

Questions? Feedback? The Community page on our website lists a number of ways that you can get in touch with us. We monitor and respond to messages on the Slack group and user forum on an ongoing basis, and we’d love to hear from you.

Zeebe 0.17 Release Notes

In Zeebe 0.16, we completed a migration from payloads to variables and scopes for workflow instance dataflow.

Early adopters shared the feedback that variables would provide users with more flexibility and would be easier to reason about than payloads. Because payloads were attached to workflow instance tokens, whenever there was hierarchical or parallel execution (such as an embedded subprocess or parallel gateway), it was difficult to access the payload from a different branch. Additionally, it wasn’t intuitive to the user how to handle the merging of 2 or more payloads, with lots of manual mapping required.

These improvements to one of Zeebe’s fundamental concepts means that 0.17.0 introduces a handful of API breaking changes, most of which related to this payloads to variables migration. Here are a few of the details:

• API methods that were previously called payload are now called variables. This update affects the Zeebe CLI, too.
• Expressions are now written without $. So, for example, $.foo would now be written as foo. This affects sequence flows out of the Exclusive Gateway in the Zeebe Modeler and also Input/Output variable mappings and Message Correlation Key.
• For the sake of consistency and clarity, many Maven artifacts were renamed to be prefixed with zeebe instead of zb.
• In job workers, bufferSize has been changed to the more intuitive maxJobsActive.

Additionally, the exporter API was moved to the package io.zeebe.exporter.api. Previously, it was io.zeebe.exporter.

If you have any questions about these changes, please let us know via the Zeebe user forum.

Zeebe Q2-2019 Roadmap

We’re excited to share that we’ve updated the Roadmap page on zeebe.io to include our planned work for Q2-2019. There are three main areas the team will be focused on this coming quarter:

• Make it possible for a Zeebe cluster to run forever: To enable a long-running cluster, Zeebe will need to delete data no longer required for execution of active workflow instances.
• Ensure that a Zeebe cluster is fault tolerant: To prepare Zeebe for production-readiness, we need to harden and extensively test its fault tolerance characteristics.
• Provide user guidelines for Zeebe production usage: To ensure users can confidently run Zeebe in production, we’ll improve the documentation and add new entries.

The top priorities in the near-term are clustering and stability. Q2 represents our final push as we get Zeebe to production readiness, and we’re on track for a first production-ready release at the end of Q2 / the start of Q3.

Recent Zeebe Blog Posts

In case you missed it, we published 2 Zeebe blog posts in the past month. Check them out if you haven’t already!

• ‘How Does Zeebe Compare to X?’: An Evaluation Framework (a guide for understanding how Zeebe compares to other orchestration tools, from the Zeebe perspective)
• BPMN Support in Zeebe Through 0.16: A Quick Primer (A review of all BPMN symbols supported by Zeebe with basic guidelines on how to apply them to your use case)

That’s all for now! Please get in touch with questions or comments.