The Zeebe and Operate teams are excited to announce the release of Zeebe 0.18.0 and Operate-1.0.0-alpha11. You can download the Zeebe and Operate distributions here.
Additionally, Docker images are available in Docker Hub:
Shout out to our developer advocate Josh Wulf for creating and maintaining this repository.
These minor version releases give us an opportunity to share what we’ve been working on early and often, and as always, we’re happy to hear your feedback on new features and functionality.
To get in touch with us with questions or comments, you can start a new topic in the Zeebe user forum.
In this post, we’ll summarize features and improvements included in these releases along with some context on why we think they’re exciting.
Zeebe 0.18.0
This is a meaningful release for Zeebe as it’s the last release that’s planned before the first-ever production-ready Zeebe release in Q3 2019.
Zeebe 0.18.0 includes all of the features–from BPMN element support to exporter capabilities to fault tolerance–that are planned for the production-ready release. And so the focus for Zeebe in the coming month is testing, testing, and more testing. We’d greatly appreciate reports of any issues or feedback via the forum or Slack.
This release does include a couple of breaking changes as well as a significant refactoring. All breaking changes are listed in the release notes.
The one breaking change that we’ll mention here is the removal of list and get workflows from the Zeebe API. We made the change because these were the only two remaining queries in the API, and this gets us to a point of a consistent command API instead. For context, these querying capabilities were added before we created the exporter API, which offers the same functionality.
Additionally, there was a major refactoring of our clustering code as we work toward improved stability of clustering. We’re especially eager for feedback in this topic–please don’t hesitate to share any issues that you run into.
Operate-1.0.0-alpha11
Let’s walk through highlights from the Operate alpha11 release.
Dashboard Updates
This release includes two major updates to the Operate dashboard:
- The global statistics at the top of the page were redesigned to make the current state of the system and the terminology easier to understand.
- The “Instances by Workflow” section (shown in the bottom left of the screenshot below) now includes workflow models that do not have any workflow instances with an incident and those that do not have any workflow instances at all. This update makes Operate more useful as a tool that provides fast insight into everything happening inside of Zeebe and allows for a smoother “new user” experience.
In case you need a refresher to help put the dashboard updates into context, the Operate preview release announcement blog post (among other posts) includes screenshots of what the dashboard looked like prior to alpha11.
Variable Editing
Up to this point, it was possible to add or remove a variable to a workflow instance in Operate, but it wasn’t yet possible to edit a variable. With the alpha11 release, variable editing has arrived:
Performance Improvements
Though it might not be noticeable for anyone working on an early (low-volume) proof-of-concept, we want to highlight that Operate’s backend developers implemented performance improvements this quarter, speeding up data import by 70% and batch operations by 30% according to our benchmarking environment.
That’s all for this release. Thanks for tuning in, and we’ll be back with another update soon.