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Take a Glance Inside a Camunda 7 to Camunda 8 Self-Managed Migration

Improve customer satisfaction while transitioning to an entirely different energy system? Not a problem with Camunda's Self-Managed migrations.
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  • Take a Glance Inside a Camunda 7 to Camunda 8 Self-Managed Migration

As you examine your processes or plan your next process orchestration initiative, you may consider a partial or full migration to Camunda 8. Camunda has many customers moving from Camunda 7 to Camunda 8, each with their own set of compelling events driving this migration.

These companies have realized solid results after migrating to Camunda 8. In the case of one particular customer, they saw:

  • Streamlined processes with migration to Camunda 8
  • New feature development in place of infrastructure support
  • A solid foundation to support the energy transition

Let’s review this company’s migration journey and learn more about their experience, lessons learned, and recommendations for others embarking on this journey.

A little company background

This European multibillion-dollar energy company with over 6,000 employees distributes electricity, gas, and heat to more than five million consumers and businesses.

They’re focused on expanding their energy networks and making energy systems more accessible while improving customer communication. In addition, they want to improve customer satisfaction through convenience by improving their Customer Effort Score (CES). These goals are active while the company is transitioning to a different energy system which involves more than just switching to renewable energy and physically expanding its system.

With multiple projects on Camunda 7 and a team experienced in Camunda, this organization decided to explore migrating to Camunda 8. They initiated a lighthouse project to increase their understanding of Camunda 8 and develop a proof of concept for the migration.

Why migrate?

Eager to migrate for several reasons, the primary catalyst was that the timing was ideal. Their development team had just completed a project and was still available. Additionally, they aimed to build a long-term infrastructure as a future platform. With the resources and time at hand, they decided to pursue migration.

The migration approach

Migrating projects to Camunda 8 required careful planning and execution. This organization followed the steps that are considered best practices by Camunda:

  • Evaluation
  • Scoping
  • Planning
  • Platform setup
  • Migrate and test
  • Run

Evaluation

Initially, the team evaluated Camunda 8 to ensure it met their project requirements and provided the necessary features and functionalities. This assessment confirmed that migrating to Camunda 8 was the right decision.

Scoping

The team then scoped the project to identify which parts of the existing codebase needed to be migrated. This included all backend components, ensuring a comprehensive understanding of the work involved.

Planning

With the scope defined, the team developed a detailed migration plan. This plan outlined the steps required for the transition, including a timeline, a task list, and an assessment of potential risks and issues.

Platform setup

Switching to Camunda 8 involved deploying on Kubernetes. They successfully configured and deployed our Self-Managed version of Camunda 8 on their OpenShift environment.

Migrate and test

Before proceeding with the full migration, the team tested the process on a small subset of the project. This preliminary testing phase ensured the migration would work as expected without introducing new issues or bugs.

After confirming the success of the test migration, the team began the full migration. This involved rewriting or refactoring parts of the codebase to align with Camunda 8. Once the migration was complete, they conducted thorough testing to verify the functionality and stability of the migrated code.

Run

Finally, the team deployed their first Camunda 8 process and closely monitored the platform and processes. Continuous monitoring allowed them to promptly identify and address any issues, ensuring a smooth transition and stable operation post-migration.

Project timeline

This company secured a technical account manager (TAM) in the spring of their migration to be part of their Camunda 8 evaluation and migration project. The target for their migration completion was that fall.

It was determined that this organization could not take advantage of Camunda’s SaaS offering because of their requirements for in-house infrastructure, but they embraced the Self-Managed option. This required the company to install Camunda 8 several months before their go-live date to test properly, so this environment was installed in early summer.

Their goal was to complete the following key project milestones in four months:

  • Establishment of Camunda 8 Self-Managed environment
  • Migration of two projects
  • Comprehensive testing

Slightly before their target migration completion date, they completed the successful migration to Camunda 8, adhering to the established timeline. However, it is important to acknowledge that they had their share of challenges and temporary workarounds to achieve this migration.

Steps to improve project outcome

The company wanted the migration project to be successful and took several steps to enhance the project quality and facilitate future migrations. These steps included:

  • Clean delegates: The team concentrated on improving the readability and quality of their delegate code. They focused on tasks like reading and writing process variables, as well as handling business logic delegation. Data transformations were primarily integrated into delegates, rather than using listeners.
  • Simplified expressions: Listeners and Spring beans in expressions for Java-based data transformations were avoided. There was no reliance on an ACID transaction manager spanning multiple steps or resources. Camunda APIs, whether REST or Java, were not exposed to other services or front-end applications.
  • Streamlined data handling: The team preferred using primitive variable types or JSON payloads over XML or serialized Java objects. They utilized simple expressions or FEEL (Friendly Enough Expression Language), which was the only supported expression language in Camunda 8. Special variables like `execution` or `task` were minimized in expressions.
  • Form choices: The team chose to use their own user interface or Camunda Forms, as other form mechanisms were not provided as out-of-the-box support in Camunda 8.
  • Reduced engine plugins: The reliance on engine plugins was minimized to simplify future migration efforts.

Additionally, the team evaluated the transition to the current Camunda greenfield stack for the project’s architecture.

Deployment strategy and considerations

As noted in our post Lessons Learned when Migrating from Camunda 7 to Camunda 8, there are several approaches to migration projects. This company considered these top-level strategies:

  • Big bang: This approach involves migrating everything in a single step.
  • Inside-out: In this method, components are migrated within the current application one step at a time.
  • New world: This strategy entails incrementally migrating elements to an entirely new application.

In addition to these migration approaches, there are several steps they determined they could take to simplify and reduce the workload. Since the big bang option was considered too high risk, this company opted to go with the new world approach.

Challenges faced and solutions

There aren’t many projects that do not have challenges. The key is to identify a solution and implement it in such a way that it does not sideline the entire project.

Technical challenges

During the evaluation phase, it became evident that certain areas of the migration were going to require significant effort. They identified the following challenges:

  • How to deal with Java delegates and task listeners, which were integral components of their BPMN models
  • How to perform an essentially complete overhaul of their unit testing procedures to align with the updated Camunda version

Camunda 8 production environment issues

The DevOps team worked to install, implement, and stabilize the Camunda 8 Self-Managed platform for production but encountered issues.

Their team updated the platform as new versions were available. When they had issues, they raised JIRA tickets. Camunda’s support team worked hard to fix any issues addressing items as they were experienced. Camunda’s Customer Success Manager (CSM) and TAM worked with Product Management to allow the team to voice any concerns and provide assurance that items would continue to be addressed quickly and efficiently.

Key achievements post-migration

The company completed the migration project in early fall and successfully deployed their Camunda processes on their production Camunda 8 environment. Some of their most significant achievements were:

  • Minimizing the lead time to activate certain solutions for customers after contract signing from 62 days to only 9 days. This allowed the company to grow new solution contracts to a few hundred in 2023, over a thousand in 2024, and expect over 2500 in 2025.
  • Saving 10% of their budget and over $100,000 in employee costs with the automation of human-heavy processes specifically in the system operations, and expect more of the same in other departments.
  • Significantly reducing waiting time as well as manual labor.
  • Reducing errors with the ability to report on historical and running projects.

Including Camunda in the process of migrating

The company saw value in their migration process by including Camunda consulting. This gave them the ability to proactively mitigate risks in the project by addressing issues quickly and prioritizing properly. Camunda can provide access to multiple internal teams including support, technical account managers, consulting, customer success, and our product teams.

This does not mean that all migrations require Camunda’s assistance, but in the case of this customer, it played an important role in their success.

Conclusion

As mentioned, the organization deems this migration process a success. Some key results were as follows:

  • Streamlined processes with migration to Camunda 8 resulting in cost savings
  • Saving 3,440 hours of development time
  • New feature development in place of infrastructure support
  • A solid foundation to support the energy transition and the future

At this time, they are actively exploring additional Camunda 8 features like Connectors. They would like to remove all workarounds that were implemented as part of the migration as well.

With the success of this project, they are preparing to replicate the same process for its larger Camunda 7 process application. That project will necessitate the use of Camunda’s process instance migration feature.

Learn more about migrating

Camunda has quite a bit of information available related to migrating from Camunda 7 to Camunda 8. We encourage you to read these blog posts and review our website to gather more information so you can start your migration today:

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