Camunda Alpha Release August 2024

We’re excited to share that the latest alpha release of Camunda is now live and available for download. For our SaaS customers who are up to date, you may have already noticed some of these features as we make them available for you automatically.

Below you’ll find a quick summary of everything new in Camunda for this month.

Web Modeler

The alpha includes the following new features for Web Modeler.

Process Applications

Version Tagging

Keeping track of application versions is crucial for development teams. The new version tagging feature in Modeler simplifies this by giving you control of the version number of your process application. The version tag is saved to the BPMN XML so you can track it through your deployment pipeline.

Process Application version tagging allows users to seamlessly assign and track version tags for your process applications through the pipeline.

Changelist

With this release, we also provide the changelist which gives a detailed breakdown of the updates made to BPMN files within your application and code differences for other files making it easier to manage versions and track changes.

With this new feature, users can now cycle through files to track all changes within the application which enhances version tracking and change management.

Audit log

Camunda has extended its support of governance with its audit log features. The deployment auto log records critical deployment data such as version tags, cluster information, and user details.

This feature is vital for team leads and IT departments aiming to maintain oversight and ensure accountability in the development process.

GitHub sync (manual)

We’ve introduced native GitHub integration for process applications, enabling synchronization between Web Modeler, Desktop Modeler, and your version control system.

The Modeler now provides a GitHub sync function, streamlining the integration of the Web Modeler with existing CI/CD pipelines. This manual sync feature allows you to pull changes from GitHub and push updates without the hassle of traditional download/upload methods, fostering a more efficient and less error-prone development workflow.

Note: Git synchronization in this first iteration is manual and not automatic.

Setup

Finally, we have refined the process of setting up a process application. Developers can now select a default development cluster during the initial setup, ensuring all work is contained within a single cluster, reducing confusion, and keeping the environment uncluttered. This results in a simplified and more streamlined deployment experience.

Persist data across sessions in Play

Play now supports an end-to-end journey for saving and reusing example data. You can save your example data to the BPMN diagram so that any user can use this example data in their play sessions, eliminating the need for tedious form-fills or copy-pasting.

This saves time so you do not have to extract data from complex JSON responses and enter day when playing your processes.

We hope you enjoy everything in the latest Web Modeler 8.6.0-alpha4 release!

Desktop Modeler

There have been several updates to Desktop Modeler with this release including:

Support for Camunda 8.6 features

This release supports upcoming Camunda 8.6 features, including execution listeners, the new binding type property, and converging inclusive gateways.

Adaptable input fields

For multi-line entries in the Properties panel, the height of the input fields now adapts to the content.

Bug fixes and more

As always, this release incorporates bug fixes and additional minor improvements.

We hope you enjoy everything in this month’s Desktop Modeler 5.26.0 release.

Connectors

AWS Bedrock Connector

Camunda now offers an AWS Bedrock Connector to enhance AI-driven workflows by leveraging Bedrock’s powerful AI and ML capabilities. This Connector enables users to invoke models and utilize conversational AI directly within their BPMN processes, driving advanced automation and intelligent decision-making.

REST Connector improvements

With this release, we provide the access response in the error expression for status code “400.”

Single-click imports from Marketplace

Camunda now allows for single-click imports of BPMN, DMN, and Form files in the following:

• Import Modal
• Browse [Process] Blueprints Modal

Bug Fixes

Many bug fixes were implemented with this release as well, including improvements to the Connectors for Google Sheets, Kafla, Twilio and more.

Check out the full release notes for this month’s Connectors 8.6.0-alpha4 release right here.

Operate

Improved visuals

In Operate with this release, we have improved the visualization of the executed path of a process instance. We now highlight both the executed sequence flow and the flow nodes and provide the option to display how often each flow node was executed.

We hope you enjoy everything in the latest Operate 8.6.0-alpha4 release!

Zeebe

Several things are included with this alpha release of Zeebe including the following:

Write rate limiting

In the past, there was a resource imbalance between the load the Zeebe cluster could handle compared to the indexing load of the connected Elasticsearch cluster. This imbalance could lead to a high Zeebe exporter backlog resulting in outdated data in Operate and Tasklist. Eventually, Zeebe could start running out of disk space, as its event log can only be compacted when records are exported successfully.

Camunda now provides a flow control mechanism that factors in the exporting rate and optionally throttles the Zeebe cluster if it can’t export data at an equivalent rate. You can learn more about this in this Zeebe Chaos Blog Post, we will also publish an operational guide on its usage next.

Deployment version binding

Version binding deployment gives users a simple and safe way to reference resources that belong together in a process solution. Instead of continuing to use the latest version of a particular resource referenced in a BPMN process (another BPMN process, DMN, or a Form), you can now bind the usage to the version included within the same deployment.

This ensures predictable behavior and allows you to deploy future versions without disrupting ongoing process instances. You can learn more about this here.

Execution listeners support

An execution listener (EL) allows users to react to various events in the workflow execution lifecycle by executing custom logic. This feature provides flexibility and control over the process execution, enabling complex data handling and external system interactions without cluttering the BPMN model with technical details. Check out the documentation to learn more.

Migrate process management endpoints

With the introduction of the Zeebe REST API, we aim to simplify the installation process and improve communication within the components of Camunda.

With this release, we are happy to announce the integration of Zeebe endpoints into the Camunda REST API. This will ease the installation and onboarding to Camunda as the gPRC will not be required. Developers can now seamlessly transition from gRPC to REST with the assurance of having the same endpoints, thereby saving time and effort.

The endpoints for job activation and job failure of the Zeebe REST API are available and can be tried in this alpha release. REST gateway interceptors are also available and can be deployed for Self-Managed setup, you can learn more about those here.

Check out the full release notes for this month’s Zeebe 8.6.0-alpha4 release right here.

Self-Managed

Upgrade Experience

The upgrade experience has been enhanced by providing an improved approach for secret generation. With this new method, there is no need for lengthy secret extractions during the upgrade process.

Note: this is supported in versions 8.5 and 8.6.

Migration Support

This release supports auto-migration in Operate via intContainers.

Note: this is supported in versions 8.5 and 8.6.

Pre-provisioned persistent volumes

This release supports pre-provisioned persistent volumes for Zeebe via the volumeClaimTemplates label sector. This provides the ability to disable the use of the default storageClass in Zeebe and enable the use of a persistent volume.

Note: this is supported in versions 8.2, 8.3, 8.4, 8.5 and 8.6.

OpenShift

Previously, Camunda Helm chart installation on OpenShift required post-rendering because of an issue in the Helm CLI. In this release, Camunda refactored our Helm chart to smooth the OpenShift installation using an extra values file. This eliminates the need for the post-rending script.

Note: this is supported in version 8.6.

Optimize

Licensing Update

As announced on April 9th, 2024 in our blog entitled Licensing Update for Camunda 8 Self-Managed, Camunda is well on the way to streamlining our Camunda components for even easier installation, operation, and use.

In this release, we completed a major step by making our code “source available” as part of the single repository.  

As a reminder, starting with alpha3, we have split the releases for Optimize 7 and Optimize 8.

We hope you enjoy everything in the latest Optimize 8.6-alpha4 release!

Tasklist

We have been focusing on the Camunda Unified APIs for this release, so there are no new features to share. Stay tuned for our next alpha!

Camunda Platform 7

You can find the latest release notes for Camunda Platform 7.22.0-alpha4 on our forums. Check them out here.

Thank you

We hope you enjoy the latest updates! For more, be sure to review the latest release notes as well. If you have any feedback or thoughts, please feel free to contact us or let us know on our forum.

If you don’t have an account, you can try out the latest version today with a free trial.