Orchestrate Microservices
Scale up microservices with unparalleled performance and resilience
Break through technology limitations and execute microservices at scale
Microservices architectures are popular for their flexibility. However, an end-to-end business process usually requires multiple microservices to achieve an outcome. It can be difficult to visualize the process, enable microservices to communicate as the process runs, monitor their performance, and identify and resolve problems when they occur.
Camunda enables organizations to overcome these issues without compromising the paradigms of autonomy and loose coupling of microservices. Plus, Camunda’s cloud-native workflow engine uses event-streaming technology to deliver unparalleled performance and resilience as transaction volumes increase.
Challenges of Microservices Architectures
- Visualizing end-to-end processes across microservices
- Communication across multiple microservices
- Event monitoring, troubleshooting, and optimization
- Maintaining state while resolving problems during disruptions
- Development inconsistencies between different teams
“We see Camunda as a valuable component within our new lending platform, which is built using a microservices architecture. To achieve the desired efficiency gains, we needed a much higher degree of automation in our processes, and Camunda’s capabilities fit our needs well. It is modern, easy to integrate with, and gives us flexibility when designing our processes.”
Eric Lind, Chief Information Officer
Bluestep Bank
End-to-End Microservices Orchestration Lifecycle
Design
Align the business and IT using a common process model and the ISO-standard BPMN process modeling language
Dedicated orchestration logic enables teams to modify business processes without changing underlying services
Customizable, reusable templates empower business and IT teams to deliver orchestrated business processes faster
Automate
Highly scalable workflow engine that executes BPMN process models without violating core microservices paradigms such as isolation of services
One model view enables teams to monitor and troubleshoot processes that cross microservices and other endpoints
The workflow engine maintain the state of process instances in case of service disruptions or other problems
Improve
Compare process logs with BPMN diagrams to identify potential issues in microservice execution
One model view shows a heatmap of process performance for quick identification of bottlenecks
Customizable dashboards and KPI alerts help decision makers monitor and analyze process performance
Benefits of Camunda’s workflow engine for microservices
State handling
Persists the state of each instance of a business process (for example, each order placed on an ecommerce website)
Explicit processes
Makes business processes explicit instead of burying them in code so teams can more easily visualize and modify them
Message correlation and coordination
Merges messages belonging to a single process instance and decides next steps — BPMN automatically implements message patterns such as sequences, synchronization, mutual exclusion, and timeouts
Compensation for problems
Compensates if a business transaction or process encounters a problem that requires previously completed steps to be undone
Timeout handling
Tracks the passage of time and automatically takes action or switches to another path in the process flow if an event does not take place as expected
Error handling
Allows you to specify the behavior that should happen when an error occurs (e.g., retrying an action, taking another path)
Transparency of status
Enables operations teams to monitor the status of process instances in real time
Collaboration
Provides graphical models of business processes that facilitate discussion between business stakeholders, developers, and operations teams
Learn how enterprises succeed with Camunda
Global organizations are enabling greater agility by orchestrating microservices with Camunda.
Learn how Goldman Sachs built its Enterprise Process Automation Platform to scale automation and improve the firm’s and its clients’ adaptability.
See how Decathlon transformed a monolithic process by implementing a microservices-based order manager in only one year.
Follow this large reinsurance provider’s journey toward a modern, cloud-native process automation platform using microservices and Camunda.
“I can show a flow to my business partner, and the business team can easily understand what’s going on. The technical team can understand the implementation, and we can model different errors and the process for recovering from these errors.”
Gustavo Arjones, CTO
Itau Unibanco
Helpful resources you can count on
Visit our microservices learning hub
Check out our resources to learn how to get the most value from this architectural approach.
Take our microservices masterclass
This four-part masterclass provides you with skills to develop new features faster, improve agility, and scale your organization to new heights.
Achieve high performance with Zeebe
See how Camunda’s workflow engine, Zeebe, delivers performance and resilience for high-volume business processes.
Frequently asked questions
What is microservices orchestration?
Microservices orchestration coordinates multiple services, people, and endpoints to deliver a single end-to-end business outcome. Instead of stitching calls ad hoc, you model the business process, define how services collaborate, and run that model on an engine that manages state, resilience, and visibility. With Camunda, teams visualize the entire process using BPMN, enable reliable communication across services as the process runs, and monitor execution to spot and fix issues quickly. Camunda’s cloud-native workflow engine, Zeebe, uses event streaming to scale as volumes grow, while preserving autonomy and loose coupling for each service. The result is faster delivery, fewer blind spots, and a shared source of truth for cross-service processes without compromising microservice boundaries.
How does Camunda support microservices orchestration?
Camunda supports the full lifecycle. In design, business and IT align on a BPMN process model and reuse templates to accelerate delivery. In automation, a highly scalable, cloud-native engine executes the model without violating microservice isolation, maintains process state through disruptions, and provides a single view to monitor and troubleshoot flows that span many services. In improvement, teams compare execution logs with BPMN diagrams, use heatmaps to locate bottlenecks, and track KPIs with customizable dashboards and alerts. This combination of modeling, execution, and continuous optimization turns fragmented service calls into a resilient, observable process that scales with demand.
What use cases are ideal for microservices orchestration?
Microservices orchestration excels when a business outcome requires many services to collaborate over time or react to events. Examples include loan origination, order-to-cash, customer onboarding, claims handling, and subscription changes, where validation, enrichment, fraud checks, notifications, and human approvals must happen in the right order. Event-triggered scenarios such as provisioning, fulfillment, or exception handling also benefit, since the engine correlates events to long-running process instances and preserves state during outages. You can use Camunda to increase automation rates and visibility across these journeys while keeping the underlying services autonomous and loosely coupled.
What are the key components or architecture patterns of microservices orchestration?
A modern setup includes: 1) a process model that acts as the contract for cross-service collaboration; 2) a cloud-native workflow engine that executes the model, maintains state, and scales via event streaming; 3) a communication layer that invokes services through APIs and correlates events as the process progresses; and 4) an operations layer with end-to-end monitoring, heatmaps, troubleshooting, dashboards, and KPI alerts. This architecture preserves service autonomy while giving you a single model view of multi-service flows, faster problem resolution, and the ability to change process logic without rewriting services.
How quickly can we get started with microservices orchestration using Camunda?
Teams typically start by modeling one real cross-service process, then connecting a few services to the BPMN model to prove the orchestration pattern. Because Camunda is cloud-native and designed for microservices, you can integrate services incrementally, keep existing APIs, and begin monitoring a single end-to-end flow in days, not months. The workflow engine maintains state during disruptions, which simplifies error handling while you scale. As you expand, reusable templates, a one-model monitoring view, heatmaps, and KPI dashboards help you optimize performance and roll out changes without touching individual services.
