In recent years, microservices and event-driven architectures have gained popularity as ways to design, implement, and manage scalable distributed systems. According to the Gartner®, “publish-subscribe (pub-sub) is a powerful, essential and widespread pattern in modern software and systems architecture.”[1].
Along with that popularity, message queue technology and event brokers such as Kafka have become essential for enabling asynchronous, service-to-service communication in distributed systems. Leveraging message queue technology helps software development teams build scalability and resilience into their applications; and if they’re building microservices, messaging queue technology helps them ensure loose coupling between individual services.
How message queue technology and process orchestration work together
In business applications, message queue technology is an excellent complement to process orchestration technology like Camunda Platform. Event brokers enable communication between software components or services, and Camunda Platform orchestrates the business process across all components as well as other endpoints (such as RPA bots, ERP and CRM systems, and so on).
To facilitate easy integration with message queue technology, we offer outbound Connectors for Kafka, RabbitMQ, Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS, and AWS Lambda. Outbound Connectors enable Camunda-based processes to trigger things to happen in external systems or services. To learn about these Connectors, check out Boosting your microservice architecture with message broker Connectors.
However, outbound Connectors are only one piece of the puzzle. To achieve seamless, full-featured integration with message queue systems, we’re introducing a new type of inbound Connector for Camunda Platform: inbound subscription Connectors.
Inbound Connectors enable processes in Camunda Platform to receive data or messages from external systems or services. We’ve already released inbound webhook Connectors that allow a process instance to be triggered by any system that supports webhooks or that can send an HTTP POST payload to a URL. Now, we’re adding support for inbound subscription Connectors, which can trigger a process instance by subscribing to a message queue topic.
Inbound subscription Connectors for Kafka, RabbitMQ, and Amazon SQS are now available, as well as an inbound webhook Connector for Amazon SNS.
Inbound subscription Connectors allow you to:
- Easily integrate your business processes with popular message queue technologies
- Start a process instance by subscribing to an event or receiving a defined event, enabling more dynamic and responsive workflows
- Reuse inbound subscription Connectors in all of your processes
- Create your own custom inbound subscription Connector without writing any code, saving time and reducing complexity
- Deploy your custom inbound subscription Connectors for teams to reuse
Support for inbound Connectors on Intermediate Catch Events
But wait, there’s more! In addition to support for inbound subscription Connectors, we’ve extended support for inbound Connectors to include BPMN Intermediate Catch Events. Now, in addition to Start Events, you can use inbound webhook and subscription Connectors as Intermediate Events. This feature allows a process instance to wait for a result asynchronously. For example, an ecommerce purchasing process can wait for the customer to complete their payment. To learn more, check out Streamline Processes by Using Inbound Webhook Connectors as Intermediate Events.
Build your own inbound Connectors
Connectors provide a multilayer coding experience for everyone, from business technologists to software developers. If you want to build your own custom inbound Connector, you can start with our templates for Start Events and Intermediate Catch Events.
Learn more
In addition to inbound subscription Connectors, we offer inbound webhook Connectors. Visit Maximum Process Flexibility with Inbound Webhook Connectors to learn more.
For detailed information about the way Connectors work and how you can use them, check out A Deep Dive into the Camunda Connectors Architecture, presented by Senior Product Manager Bastian Körber and Software Engineer Pavel Kotelevsky at the 2023 Camunda Community Summit.
[1] GARTNER®, Succeed With Event-Driven Implementations by Correcting Common Misconceptions, 30 May 2023. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved
