Camunda Platform 8 - Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Commercial Questions
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The key difference with Camunda Platform SaaS is that we host and guarantee uptime – we take care of all infrastructure setup and maintenance allowing developers to focus on building value rather than building & maintaining infrastructure. Our SaaS infrastructure is optimized for Platform 8 ensuring maximum uptime, consistent low-latency, and high standards of security.
With Self-Managed – you host with no uptime guarantees. This means your team is responsible for setup, performance, security, redundancy, maintenance.
SaaS is available as a 30-day free trial, while Self-Managed is free forever with non-production usage of Operate, Tasklist, and Optimize.
As you might imagine, with a SaaS offering, we take security and privacy seriously. Camunda’s security and privacy programs are led by a Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) and a data protection officer (DPO). In addition, we have teams focusing on information security (InfoSec), regulatory compliance, software vulnerabilities, and Camunda Platform 8 security operations to keep your data private and secure. Camunda is ISO 27001 certified and both ISO 27017/18 and SOC2 are on our roadmap for both SaaS and Self-Managed editions. Further details.
For those customers who still require hosting on their own hardware or infrastructure, we do have the ability via Camunda Platform 8 Self-Managed edition.
Camunda’s security and privacy programs are led by a Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) and a data protection officer (DPO). In addition, we have teams focusing on information security (InfoSec), regulatory compliance, software vulnerabilities, and Camunda Platform 8 security operations to keep your data private and secure. Camunda is ISO 27001 certified and both ISO 27017/18 and SOC2 are on our roadmap. Further details
The support offerings will remain the same as today with Camunda 7. For more information on our support and services, visit our support information page or contact Camunda Sales for additional detail.
If you are a Camunda 7.x Community Edition user and are looking for the equivalent version for Camunda Platform 8, you should download the Camunda Platform 8 Self-Managed – Free edition. This can be downloaded via the Camunda website. The Self-Managed – Free edition includes unlimited usage of Zeebe and Modeler, along with non-production licenses for all other process experience components.
We are happy to share our roadmap with interested customers on a case by case basis – this will be presented by the product team and should be requested via your customer success manager. We do not have current plans to have our roadmap posted publicly.
Camunda Platform 8 Self-Managed Free Edition is the most comparable to the Camunda Platform 7 Community Edition license. There are some differences to note:
- Camunda 8’s workflow engine, Zeebe, is licensed under the Zeebe Community License 1.1
- Tasklist and Operate (which replaces Cockpit) usage is non-production, however, they can be used in development with no limitations.
- Optimize is now included for non-production usage, however, it can be used in development with no limitations.
For additional detail, see the table below:
C7 Community Edition | C8 Self-Managed Free Edition | |
Workflow & DMN Engine | Included | Included (Zeebe) |
Cockpit / Operate | Included (limited functionality) | Included but non-production |
Tasklist | Included | Included but non-production |
Optimize | Not included | Included but non-production |
Modeler Desktop | Included | Included |
Modeler Web | Cawemo (limited functionality) | Only available on SaaS at launch |
For Camunda Platform 7, please visit the How to Contribute page and GitHub for more information.
For Camunda Platform 8, we continue to accept contributions to Zeebe, clients, bpmn-io, Modeler, community projects and more. For more information, please visit the documentation.
The key difference between Camunda Platform SaaS and Self-Manages is that with SaaS, we host and guarantee uptime – we take care of all infrastructure setup and maintenance allowing developers to focus on building value rather than building & maintaining infrastructure. Our SaaS infrastructure is optimized for Platform 8 ensuring maximum uptime, consistent low-latency and high standards of security.
With Self-Managed – you host with no uptime guarantees. This means your team is responsible for setup, performance, security, redundancy and maintenance.
SaaS is available as a 30-day free trial, while Self-Managed is free forever with non-production usage of Operate, Tasklist and Optimize.
C8 Self-Managed Free Edition | C8 Self-Managed Enterprise Edition | |
Zeebe (workflow & decision engine) | Included | Included |
Operate | Included but non-production | Included |
Tasklist | Included but non-production | Included |
Optimize | Included but non-production | Included |
Modeler (Desktop) | Included | Included |
Technical Support | No | 8/5 with option for 24/7 |
Usage | Unlimited Process Instances and Decision Instances | Unlimited Process Instances, Decision Instances, and Task Users available |
Consulting and Training Services | No | Options for custom training and consulting available. |
Customer Success Management | No | Yes |
What is the difference between Camunda Platform 8 SaaS Professional & Enterprise versions?
Camunda Platform 8 SaaS Professional Edition | Camunda Platform 8 SaaS Enterprise Edition | |
Camunda Platform 8 components:
| Included | Included |
Technical Support | 8/5 | 8/5 with option for 24/7 |
Usage | Designed for low volume production usage – view pricing | Designed for large volume production usage – view pricing |
Consulting and Training Services | No | Options for custom training and consulting available |
Customer Success Management | No | Yes |
For information and additional FAQ’s related to the Zeebe licensing, please visit our Zeebe License and Overview FAQ page.
Technical Questions
The public documentation clearly defines Supported Environments. We recommend running Camunda 8 Self-Managed on Kubernetes using the Helm charts. Please get in touch with our team for a deeper dive on sizing best-practices and how they might apply to your use case.
While the majority of features from Camunda Platform 7 exist in 8, we have identified a few that will not be included.
- CMMN modeling support will not be included in Camunda 8, as BPMN is what we recommend and will officially support moving forward.
- Embedded engine and container-managed engine will no longer be supported as Camunda Platform should be used as a process orchestrator and kept separate from workers and business logic for improved scalability and isolation.
- Runtime data in relational databases is no longer needed, however business data will remain in such databases; Camunda will ensure that runtime data is stored reliably and efficiently at scale.
- Custom application servers are no longer required by Zeebe and Optimize, Operate, and Tasklist.
There will be some level of education needed, mostly around the architecture and API’s. For those already familiar with external task workers implementation is nearly the same. The basic BPMN/DMN knowledge remains the same.
One of the great benefits of our SaaS offering is it reduces operational overhead. For those running our Self-Managed edition, it is important to have a working knowledge of Docker & Kubernetes as well as some education around the differences in performance tuning between Camunda Platform 7 and 8.
If you have a team comfortable running apps in Kubernetes, setup and configuration will be seamless.
Yes, however we recommend that existing Camunda 7 implementations remain on Camunda 7. If you have a compelling reason and would like to migrate to Camunda 8, you will need to update your architecture. To get an idea of what is involved, please review our migration documentation. For additional information on how Camunda can help with migration, please reach out to your customer success manager.
In our SaaS product, we allow you to spin up your own clusters that include Zeebe, Operate, Tasklist, Optimize. Zeebe replicates across machines using the RAFT protocol, to learn more about this replication, please visit our documentation. All clusters leverage regional disks and regional GKE. All web applications and Elasticsearch are also clustered to ensure high availability. If you have further requirements (e.g. cross-region clusters) please let your customer success rep or account executive know.
The answer to this question is complicated, but fortunately, we have a blog post that we recommend reading for detailed information.
Camunda Platform 8 is hosted on Google Cloud Platform with GCP regions in the USA, Belgium, and Australia.
The workflow engine was designed to accommodate legacy extensibility patterns, for example extending through Java Delegates. Firstly extending the engine requires a rebuild and redeploy which is costly. Secondly extending the engine directly could lead to vulnerabilities if the extension is malformed or even nefarious. Lastly, scaling the workflow engine is complex and does not take advantage of modern auto-scaling techniques. Zeebe aims to solve that by 1. Using an event model where applications (workers) can listen and react to changes 2. Securely run applications (workers) outside of the engine context and 3. Allow Zeebe to scale as the number of process instances increases. For additional information, read this article.
Historic process information is stored in Operate and Optimize. Operate provides a REST API that allows to query historic process instance, flow node, incident or variable information. It uses the openAPI standard. If you are interested in accessing historic information for process improvement including reporting and dashboarding then Optimize is the way to go. In C8 Self-Managed on top of that you can also stream Zeebe event data into your own data store with the help of a custom exporter.
With Camunda 8, the external task client model is the one and only way to write glue code that can connect the workflow engine with your own services or business logic. However, Camunda 8 also introduces convenient programming language support to hide the complexities of introducing remote communication, making programming the glue code for Camunda 8 quite similar to Java Delegates of Camund a7. For additional information, read this article.
Camunda Platform 8 release components can be found here. For additional information on our roadmap, please contact your customer success representative who will coordinate a roadmap discussion with our product team.
For automation components such as Zeebe, Operate, and Tasklist, customers will be able to update their clusters on their own. Other components like Console and Web Modeler will be continuously deployed and updated.
Despite Camunda Platform 8.0 being a major new “.0” release, it is technically Camunda Cloud 1.4 and has been in production with large scale implementations for some time now.
Zeebe has already 6 years of R&D. It has been:
- Production ready since 2019
- Camunda Cloud has been GA since 2020
The decision to migrate existing projects from Camunda Platform 7 to 8 is at the sole discretion of our valued customers. You should consider migration if you are:
- Looking to reduce hardware or infrastructure setup and maintenance costs, the SaaS offering of Camunda Platform 8 would be a good reason to migrate.
- In need of performance at scale and/or improved resilience.
- In need of certain features that can only be found in Camunda Platform 8 such as the new connectors and integration framework, streamlined UI in Operate or the improved collaboration features in web modeler.
To get an idea of what is involved, please review our migration documentation. For additional information on how Camunda can help with migration, please reach out to your customer success manager.