We’re thrilled to announce Camunda Platform 8.1, the latest release of our process orchestration solution. This new version introduces features that accelerate connectivity to the many different systems and technologies that are required for true digital transformation, including:
- Create custom Connectors with our Integration Framework to accelerate connectivity
- New out-of-the-box Connectors for popular services
- Enhancements to Camunda Modeler that improve productivity
- Hot backups and official support for Amazon EKS and Red Hat OpenShift
- Plus, several upgrades requested by Camunda Platform 7 customers
Organizations across all industries rely on complex technology stacks to adapt and enhance their operations in response to market dynamics, new disruptive companies, and increasing consumer expectations. Your technology stack likely includes everything from cutting-edge technologies to legacy systems and homegrown software that’s hard to replace.
Integrating these diverse systems into business processes is challenging. However, if your systems aren’t integrated, you can end up creating islands of automation that are impossible to orchestrate. Forrester calls out this imperative in a recent report:
“The endgame is an autonomous enterprise. To attain this, firms must evolve an enterprise wide automation fabric that weaves together workforce, processes, and technology and promotes an automation-first culture.”
Forrester, Take the First Steps Towards an Automation Fabric, May 19, 2022
Camunda Platform 8.1 makes it easier to connect diverse systems and technologies to your business processes. You’ll be more able to eliminate islands of automation and achieve true digital transformation by orchestrating processes from end to end.
Want to see Camunda in action? Join our live release webinar on October 25 to see how these features speed up your digital transformation projects.
Connect any system or technology with our Integration Framework
Many organizations rely on a patchwork of legacy systems and new or emerging technologies to operate. Each new system or technology adds to the organization’s maintenance costs, making it exponentially harder to improve a business process.
The Integration Framework provides a way for organizations to create an integration with any system by building reusable Connectors. The framework comes in two parts; a Connector SDK to help developers quickly build and test custom Connectors, and Connector Templates for a low-code experience and reusability in multiple process models.
Want to learn more about Connectors and see them in action? Watch the Camunda Question Corner video above to learn more.
Connectors built using the SDK are environment-agnostic, giving you the flexibility to use them on-premise or cloud depending on your organization’s preference. You can simply build a Connector once then reuse it in any environment.
New out-of-the-box Connectors for popular services
A diverse set of process endpoints such as APIs, RPA bots, and microservices are commonplace in most organizations’ technology stacks.
Camunda Platform 8.1 expands the number of out-of-the-box Connectors to help speed up the development of applications using these popular services. The new Connectors for Amazon SQS, AWS Lambda, Google Drive, and Slack provide a simple modeling experience that enable less-technical developers to design processes to orchestrate these systems.
Functionality our new pre-built Connectors offer:
- Slack: Send message to channel or user
- Google Drive: Create folder, or create file from template
- Amazon SQS: Send message to queue
- AWS Lambda: Invoke function
Pre-built Connectors are available in Web Modeler and also be used with Desktop Modeler. With input from our customers, partners, and the Camunda Community, we’re continuously developing new Connectors that you think are most helpful.
Write cleaner expressions in less time
Speed up transforming data with the FEEL Expression Editor and Intelligent Code Completion
Developers must understand FEEL (Friendly Enough Expression Language) expressions to effectively map and transform data across a business process.
The new FEEL Expression Editor is our first dedicated editor tooling for any of the script languages we support. It helps to ensure correct syntax by highlighting any mistakes that need correction before deployment.
Intelligent code completion helps developers quickly write accurate FEEL expressions regardless of their experience level. Context-aware suggestions appear as developers write expressions. Auto-completing code will display variables, operators, and functions given the context of the expression.
Official support for Amazon EKS and Red Hat OpenShift
Deploying self-managed environments often requires additional steps and configuration. The extra effort didn’t align with our developer-friendly strategy and reduced time-to-value.
With this latest release, developers can more easily set up a self-managed version of Camunda Platform 8 using Helm charts and documentation specific to Red Hat OpenShift and Amazon EKS.
Gain peace of mind with hot backups
Previously with self-managed deployments, backing up your data required shutting down the system, which could potentially cause data to be lost. This latest release lets Self-Managed customers back up the entire Camunda 8 Platform while running and without downtime.
A hot backup takes a “snapshot” of the entire platform to ensure that every component stays in sync. These backups can then be used to restore the system if it suffers a significant disruption.
Repair and resolve incidents without disrupting your operations
Modify in-flight processes without interruption
Handling incidents is risky because you don’t want to lose data or disrupt the business. Likewise, you don’t want to cancel the instance and rerun every step in a process if you’re testing an isolated section of a process model.
With Camunda Operate, you can start a process instance at any point in a process model flow to get it into the correct state. This will let you repair your process instances by moving running flow nodes, adding new or canceling existing ones via UI.
Latest improvements in Camunda Platform 7.18
For Camunda Platform 7.18, we’ve listened to our customers’ requests and developed key features to meet their needs. Our continued support is something we’re proud to offer as we deliver new features for our existing customers and community.
Improved operations view for high-volume batches
Managing high volumes of batch jobs is challenging. This redesign adds filters and attributes that make it easier to determine which batches have already run. Users can see batch jobs by user and start time, search in-progress batches, and delete completed batches from Cockpit.
Quickly filter and select batches of jobs to rerun or delete
Safer interaction patterns for batch operations
Previously, users could start batch jobs accidentally causing additional work or rework — especially when changes need to be rolled back.
Updates to the batch operations view in Cockpit bring more clarity and safety when selecting multiple jobs. Dialogs and navigation improvements help users avoid accidentally selecting too many process instances to focus on managing only the needed jobs.
Enhanced context in log files
Analyzing log files without proper context is challenging and slows down resolving incidents. Environments with multiple engines make this even more difficult as the specific engine that generated the log entry is obscured.
Log files now offer greater context to help fix incidents efficiently. Logs contain the activity name, the engine, and the process definition key.
We’re grateful to our customers and community for their suggestions and requests. You help us shape and improve our product to better serve your needs with each iteration. Be sure to join our webinar on October 25 to hear about these updates in depth from experts at Camunda.
