As organizations increasingly embrace agility, rapid deployment is no longer a luxury—it is a necessity. At Camunda, we aim to help businesses achieve scalable, adaptable, and fast deployment by leveraging cloud-native solutions and state-of-the-art integration with continuous delivery and infrastructure as code.
This blog post discusses the key ideas from my recent CamundaCon New York talk, The Agile Enterprise: Rapid Deployment with Camunda 8. This talk demonstrates how Camunda helps accelerate deployment within agile enterprises, focusing on practical takeaways and the principles that enable agility at scale.
Cloud-native and modular deployment
Camunda is built on a cloud-native architecture that leverages Kubernetes to support modular, scalable deployments. While traditional options such as deploying on VMs or bare metal are still available, Kubernetes provides the flexibility needed to scale seamlessly, collaborate across cross-functional teams, and leverage modern DevOps practices.
With Kubernetes, our deployments become more modular and can evolve in sync with changing business needs.
Integrating CI/CD and infrastructure as code
Effective continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) is a cornerstone of rapid deployment. At Camunda, we deeply integrate with popular infrastructure as code (IaC) tools, such as Terraform, Ansible, and Argo CD, enabling consistent and repeatable deployments across environments. This approach supports rapid development, easy rollback, and predictable scaling.
The power of IaC is particularly evident when deploying environments across cloud providers—whether AWS, Azure, or other services like OpenShift. By specifying the desired state of the infrastructure using tools like Terraform, you ensure that Kubernetes clusters and all related components are automatically and reliably created, updated, or even recovered.
This allows developers and operators to focus on value delivery without worrying about complex manual configuration.
Reference architectures: a blueprint for success
Starting with Camunda 8.7 (coming in February), we are planning to offer detailed reference architectures that guide enterprises through effective deployments. These architectures provide deployment guides, operational best practices, and specific reference implementations that help teams deploy Camunda on Kubernetes, VMs, or bare metal.
The goal is to help you accelerate time to market by offering a standardized starting point from which you can build custom solutions that meet your unique needs.
Our reference architectures will include everything from secure, high-availability (HA) configurations to monitoring and operational procedures. These guides are designed to make moving from development to production seamless while ensuring consistency and compliance.
Agile and rapid iteration
Agility in business processes is achieved not just by deployment but by iterative, rapid changes that adapt to evolving business requirements. The key is cross-functional collaboration: developers, business stakeholders, and operators work together using Camunda’s modeling tools, which allow them to build, iterate, and deploy processes quickly.
By supporting rapid iterations and tight CI/CD integration, Camunda makes it possible to develop and deploy new workflows at the speed of business.
For instance, during the talk, I showcased a simple credit card charge process built using this Getting Started guide. It started from a local environment using Camunda Desktop Modeler and later moved to CI deployment on AWS EKS using GitHub Actions and Terraform. You can find the project I used during my talk on GitHub.
The demonstration illustrated how easily a locally designed diagram could be transitioned into a Kubernetes-based production environment, highlighting the power of rapid prototyping and iteration. Be sure to check out the presentation to see it in action.
Enabling pro developers with advanced tooling
Our tooling expands beyond Desktop Modeler for professional developers. We support remote clusters for development, enabling easy collaboration within and across teams. With integrated CI/CD pipelines, changes made to workflows can be tested, validated, and pushed to production with minimal manual intervention.
The ability to automate these steps ensures agility without compromising stability.
Our Getting Started guides provide a simple yet effective introduction to these processes. They support developers in setting up their environments, building projects, writing Java code, and quickly deploying to test environments. Additionally, our Camunda process test library offers an extensive framework for testing your BPMN processes to ensure they meet the expected quality before being deployed.
Moving from experimentation to production is a natural and well-supported journey with Camunda.
Looking ahead
As we continue to evolve our platform, expect more reference architectures, streamlined deployments on additional cloud providers, and stronger integration with monitoring tools like Prometheus and Datadog. These enhancements will support centralized monitoring and advanced DevOps workflows, helping you maximize Camunda for your agile enterprise needs.
With Camunda, the journey from a simple deployment to a fully integrated production setup is smoother than ever. Our approach to rapid deployment empowers your teams to adapt quickly to business changes and lead innovation in your industry.
Learn more
Watch the entire talk for free to dive deeper into the topic, and you can get started today with a free trial of Camunda.
Start the discussion at forum.camunda.io