The Rise of Camunda Cloud
Whether you’re a current Camunda Platform user, interested in our open source software, or simply poking around our blog as a result of a tweet you saw from someone in our community, you may have noticed an increase in the number of times you’re seeing words like Camunda Cloud, SaaS, or Zeebe pop up over the past few months.
As you may know, we first released Zeebe, the source-available, community-supported workflow engine, in 2017 (read the history of Zeebe in our CEO’s words). Since then, in addition to creating an amazing enterprise product with Camunda Platform, we’ve been listening to your feedback on Zeebe as well as Camunda Cloud, working hard to build a SaaS product that you’ll love to use.
We’ve focused on stability, reliability, and performance with the latest release of Zeebe which came out on Jan 12. We’re far enough along in our innovation and cloud-solution development that it’s time for the next step, wrapping Zeebe technology into a fully supported, highly scalable SaaS offering to meet the needs of cloud-native workflows. More news to come in the weeks ahead as we ready Camunda Cloud for general availability launch.
Today we released Camunda Cloud 1.0.0-alpha2 — we encourage you to try it out and as always, provide feedback for us so we can solidify the product even more. With Zeebe as the engine that’s powering Camunda Cloud, we’re actively working toward better tooling with a variety of components including Console, Operate, and Tasklist (with Cawemo and Optimize coming soon!), more transparency into your processes, and an increased level of support, all of which will allow you to solve even more automation challenges at your company.
Zeebe Welcomes the Camunda Cloud Community
As we prepare for Camunda Cloud GA, we know we need a place for everyone who’s engaging with us regarding Camunda Cloud to ask questions, meet each other, exchange ideas, and share their latest projects. Rather than starting up a brand-new community, we’ve expanded and renamed the Zeebe forum and Slack group to include the entire Camunda Cloud community. Don’t worry — the forum and the Slack group are still the right places to ask questions about Zeebe and share your latest projects. But now you have a place to bring your questions about Camunda Cloud and all of its components as well.
Additionally, we’ve moved all of our current repositories out of the Zeebe org and into the Camunda Cloud organization. The Camunda Cloud GitHub org now contains code that you can get paid support for, or use for free with community support. If you have any of these repos bookmarked, those links will still work — GitHub handles all of the redirects for us without a hitch!
We’re also excited to highlight community-maintained repos in a way that makes your contributions more accessible to a wider audience via our newly announced Camunda Community Hub, which will feature community-maintained repos for Camunda Cloud as well as Camunda Platform and BPMN.io. You’ll also find a handful of tutorials and tools built by our Developer Relations team — ways that we’ve used Camunda products to make our jobs easier. We’d love to hear your feedback as we continue to roll out GitHub labels and badges, as well as new and improved contributor documentation.
Moving Toward Camunda Cloud 1.0
You are welcome to continue using your current Zeebe ecosystem, but we hope you will transition to Camunda Cloud to take advantage of the additional features and functionality. Chief among these is access to our Engineering and Support teams, who will prioritize your issues and work with you to make sure that your deployment is successful.
We’re working hard on Getting Started Guides, update guidance for 0.x to 1.0, and more over the next few weeks and would love your continued feedback as we start to roll these out. Whether you’re planning to use Camunda Cloud or continuing to use the community-supported Zeebe ecosystem, we’d encourage you to plan for the software update to 1.0 sooner rather than later, using our alpha releases to spin up some test clusters, work out any kinks, and figure out what you’ll need to update in order to be successful with the upcoming release.
What all of this boils down to is that Camunda Cloud, along with the associated features, components, and rebranded community forums, is just one way we’re prepared to better support the Zeebe community. As we continue to make improvements to the product as well as the community platforms, know that we have your best interests at heart and want to ensure the best possible experience for you.
Your ongoing support, feedback, and contributions are a big part of what’s gotten us this far, and we look forward to what we can do together in the future!
FAQ
What is Camunda Cloud?
Camunda Cloud is our newest product, which delivers on-demand Process Automation as a Service. It provides a powerful execution engine for BPMN workflows paired with tools for collaborative modeling, operations and analytics.
What Camunda Cloud offerings are available?
Camunda Cloud is available as a free trial, a professional tier and an enterprise tier.
Depending on your subscription tier, Camunda Cloud is available in two different distributions:
- SaaS: all subscription tiers (the free trial, professional tier and enterprise tier) are available as a SaaS solution.
- Self-Managed: Camunda Cloud enterprise tier customers also have the option to deploy Camunda Cloud in their own data center or private cloud (“Camunda Cloud Self-Managed”).
What’s included in Camunda Cloud?
Camunda Cloud includes the following components:
Component | Availability with Camunda Cloud SaaS | Available with Camunda Cloud Self Managed |
---|---|---|
Zeebe | Yes | Yes |
Camunda Modeler | Yes | Yes |
Operate | Yes | Yes |
Tasklist | Yes | Yes |
Console | Yes | Future releases |
Kubernetes Operators | Yes | Future releases |
Cloud Modeler | Yes | Future releases |
What does this mean for Zeebe as a community project?
Zeebe is the process engine that powers our Camunda Cloud product offerings.
Our commitment to developing in the open with a source available license remains unchanged. Zeebe 1.0 continues to be developed in the open under the same license (the Zeebe Community License), and can be used as a standalone component, along with its community ecosystem, without paid support.
We do not plan to change this.
Zeebe continues to be developed and released on GitHub, but it is moved to a new GitHub organization: Camunda Cloud. We are also folding the Zeebe documentation into a new Camunda Cloud documentation website.
Zeebe ecosystem components that are primarily maintained by Camunda engineers, but which do not have a paid support offering or an SLA are moved to a new GitHub organization: Camunda Community Hub.
Zeebe 0.26 will continue to receive maintenance updates until July 2021.
Is there a free trial of Camunda Cloud?
Yes, there is a free trial of Camunda Cloud. This allows you to try out Camunda Cloud and run development workloads in a SaaS environment on demand right away.
Can I run Zeebe on-prem or in my own cloud, for free?
You can run source-available Zeebe for free (subject to its license conditions – essentially, you can’t create and sell a Zeebe SaaS).
Can I get Enterprise Support for Zeebe?
Paid support for Zeebe is available via either Camunda Cloud Professional or Camunda Cloud Enterprise. Customers can choose either plan based on their process automation requirements. Camunda Cloud Enterprise customers also have the option of on-premises or private cloud deployment.
What components can I run on-premises or in my private cloud for free?
You can use Zeebe and any community extensions.
You can run Operate and Tasklist without a production license during development. To use Operate and Tasklist in production, you need to subscribe to Camunda Cloud Enterprise.
How and where will new versions of Zeebe be made available to the community?
You can continue to download the latest version of Zeebe from GitHub and Docker Hub by following the instructions in our documentation.
How can I contribute to Zeebe?
Zeebe continues to be developed in the open. You can open pull requests and issues, and build community extensions just as you have before Camunda Cloud.