Today we are excited to announce the three releases:
- Zeebe 1.0.0-alpha1
- Operate 1.0.0-alpha1
- Tasklist 1.0.0-alpha1
In this post, we’ll highlight some of the new capabilities introduced in these alpha releases.
Zeebe 1.0.0-alpha1
Zeebe 1.0.0-alpha1 is a big milestone for us. With this release we made major improvements to Zeebe’s Performance and Memory Management and removed YAML workflow support.
Improved Performance and Memory Management
We have made significant improvements to Zeebe’s performance and memory management by migrating RocksDB to use a one column family.
We tested performance during our normal benchmark, which starts a simple process with one task and around 40kb payload. We use three brokers with three partitions and a replication factor of three. We observed that we were able to: – Reduce memory consumption by a factor of 4 – Increase throughput by roughly 15% – Improve latency by 50%
Memory improvements can be seen in the below screenshots:
Feel free to read about all the details here.
Removal of YAML workflow support
With this first alpha release of Zeebe 1.0.0, we are removing support for YAML workflows because:
- This was an experiment we tried in the early days of Zeebe.
- The feature never got a lot of traction: While there are some users who have been using the YAML workflows in the past, we never saw strong adoption for it.
- This is a text-based format only, it is inherently limited to workflows that are quite simple. Over time, we found that Zeebe users use Zeebe for more complex end-to-end processes. BPMN is much better suited for this and we are fully committed to it. Additionally, we strongly believe in BPMN’s overall benefits for visual collaboration and modeling.
- Having two different formats for specifying flows that are not equivalent in expressivity means that there would always be confusion about which features would be supported and wherein which. Having one single format makes this much clearer.
- We will maintain backward-compatibility for user-facing features and functionality after the 1.0.0 release. After the 1.0.0 release, we will be maintaining backward-compatibility for user-facing features and functionality which means that we had to make a decision about the future of this functionality now, ahead of the 1.0 final release.
Moving forward you will need to design your processes using BPMN. If you’re new to BPMN or would like to learn more, check out our BPMN tutorial
Tasklist 1.0.0-alpha1
This is the first alpha release of Tasklist – a tool for working with User Tasks. You can filter, claim and complete user tasks that are part of your process.
Tasklist will be available as part of Camunda Cloud and also via download so it can be installed locally.
You can learn more about Tasklist by visiting our documentation page.
What’s Next?
We’ll release the next alpha releases in March 2020. Stay tuned.
How to get it
The releases for Zeebe Engine, Operate, and Tasklist have been published on GitHub and you can find the assets here.
Please note that alpha versions are not meant to be used in production and cannot be updated to minor or major releases without losing data.
Future releases will come together and also be made available as Camunda Cloud up on its GA.
