• An all-in-one distribution combining Zeebe, Operate, Tasklist, Optimize, and Identity into a single binary. This will replace both the existing Camunda 8 Self-Managed distribution as well as the standalone Zeebe download.
• A unified Camunda 8 REST API, including REST endpoints for Zeebe APIs
• Consolidation of all component source code into a single repository

Along with these improvements, we will also be simplifying our licensing model to a single license covering all the components in the distribution. This new license will allow:

• Access to source code, including components like Operate, whose source code was not previously available.
• Free access to Web Modeler for up to 5 users.
• Free usage of the all-in-one Camunda distribution for development and testing.

The new license will require a production license from Camunda to use the software in production environments. Production use is when Camunda is used to power one or more aspects of your organization, internal or external, outside of development and testing. Production licenses are available commercially or through our community programs for non-profits, academic institutions, and personal or non-commercial use cases (e.g. hobby projects). 

Camunda 8.6, releasing on October 8th, 2024, will be the first version under this new licensing model. Camunda 8.5, available today, represents the final release under our current licensing. This will be fully supported, including all applicable updates and patches, per our typical 18-month maintenance window.

Update: We want to clarify our language in this post to make sure our communications are clear regarding our typical maintenance window. Camunda 8.5, released on April 9th 2024, will be supported until October 14th, 2025. Camunda 8.6, releasing on October 8th, 2024, will be supported until April 2026.

The table below highlights the changes:

Please be assured that the changes to our distribution, APIs, and licensing model support the long-term success of our company, customers, and partners by:

• Allowing for an easier & faster installation of Camunda Self-Managed.
• Improving the developer experience with consistent APIs across all components.
• Providing a simple and easy-to-understand licensing model.
• Funding increased engineering investments in our products to achieve more value through process orchestration for our customers and partners.

I’d like to personally thank you for your support as an integral part of the Camunda community. We’re excited about our future and dedicated to delivering solutions that drive your success together.

FAQ

Why are we making this change?

• Why are you moving away from a free-for-production license model?
  
  The catalyst for this change stems from an initiative to simplify the architecture and distribution of Camunda 8 Self-Managed. Knowing that we needed a single license across all components, we then had to decide if all Camunda 8 components should become available for free production usage or will they require a commercial license. Since we are a business, we have an obligation to our customers to further accelerate innovation at Camunda. This change in licensing helps fund continued investment and innovation in Camunda’s platform.

• Given that we’re not moving forward with a free-for-production license model, why are we keeping the code available?
  
  The availability of source code aligns with our commitment to transparency and collaboration. By making the code available, developers can continue to review, understand, and trust the underlying mechanics of Camunda’s platform. We continue our commitment to developers and encourage experimentation, learning, sharing, and feedback which are essential aspects of product development and innovation.

Production Use

• Can you provide specific examples of what constitutes “development” vs. “production” use under the new license?
  
  Development use refers to any activities involved in creating, testing, or preparing applications on Camunda that are not yet deployed in a production environment. This includes but is not limited to, designing workflows, developing process applications, testing functionalities within the team(s) developing and testing the process(es), or any use case where the application is not accessible to employees or customers outside your development team(s).
  
  Production use is when Camunda is used to power one or more aspects of your business, internal or external, outside of development and testing. This encompasses applications running in live environments, where processes are executed to support business operations, customer interactions, or any external-facing service.
  
  To illustrate, during development, you might use Camunda to build and test a new customer onboarding process within your team. This scenario is considered “development use.” Once you deploy this process and it becomes accessible to your customers for onboarding, it transitions to ‘production use’ under our licensing terms.

• How will Camunda make sure users won’t be violating the license accidentally?
  
  The product will clearly indicate when an unlicensed developer edition is used. This will be achieved by a combination of indicators in the log files and the UI. These indicators will educate the user about the usage restriction.

Current Users

• Will there be any updates or patches provided for Camunda v8.5 or below?
  
  We have an 18-month maintenance window for all releases of Camunda. Camunda v8.5 will be fully supported, including all applicable updates and patches, until October 14th, 2025.

• How will this change impact current users who are using the product for free in production environments?
  
  Currently, only Camunda Zeebe allows for production usage; other components such as Operate, Optimize, and Web Modeler require a commercial license for use in production. You remain in good standing if you are running Zeebe 8.5 or below in production without a commercial license. If you upgrade to newer versions, this will require a production license.
  
  If you would like to upgrade beyond the 8.5 release, you may purchase an Enterprise license or apply for a free license for non-profits, academic institutions, and personal or non-commercial use cases (e.g. hobby projects).

• How will this licensing change impact small businesses and startups previously relying on the free-for-production model?
  
  We will continue to provide free licenses for non-profits, academic institutions, and personal or non-commercial use cases (e.g. hobby projects). For those who may not qualify for the free non-profit and academic license, we have a new, low-cost starter plan starting at just €99/month.
  
  If you still have questions about your specific scenario, contact us at community@camunda.com to discuss further.

• Will there be any changes to support and maintenance services for users under the new license?
  
  No, there are no changes to the support and maintenance services for users under the new license.

Community Programs & Contributions

• How will this change in licensing affect the community’s ability to contribute to the project?
  
  This change in licensing doesn’t impact the community’s ability to contribute.
  
  We genuinely value the contributions and engagement from our community. Your feedback, extensions, and content have played an important role in shaping our products and our journey as a company. While the licensing change does introduce some new usage constraints, we want to emphasize that our commitment to collaboration and transparency holds firm.
  
  Under the new licensing model, the source code for Camunda 8 will still be publicly available, allowing the community to explore, learn from, provide feedback on, and contribute to the codebase. We will continue to maintain open communication channels, such as forums and issue trackers, where you can share ideas, report bugs, and engage with both Camunda employees and community members.
  
  We remain dedicated to the developer ecosystem around Camunda 8 and will continue to support and encourage the development of community extensions, integrations, and plugins that enhance the capabilities of the platform.

• Are there any plans to offer discounts or special licensing options for educational, or non-profit projects?
  
  We will continue to provide free licenses for non-profits, academic institutions, and personal or non-commercial use cases (e.g. hobby projects).

• How does the company plan to address questions from the community regarding this change?
  
  We encourage you to engage in conversation with us and the larger community via our online forum or reach out to our DevRel team (community@camunda.com) to ensure your voice is heard.

The post Licensing Update for Camunda 8 Self-Managed appeared first on Camunda.

Apendo, Camunda Partner to Hyperautomate Citizen Services for Swedish Municipalities

The pandemic forced nearly everyone around the globe to do more with less – municipalities in Sweden were no exception. With tightening budget resources and increased demand from citizens, many municipalities needed to rethink the way they delivered government services. Even as the world emerges from the pandemic, the budget pressures still exist. That’s why Apendo, a leading IT consultancy in Sweden, partnered with Camunda to automate citizen services: from reporting potholes, to paying taxes, to registering for a driver’s license and beyond. 

Building a Foundation for Digital Municipalities

The more than 290 municipalities in Sweden operate under tremendous pressure to deliver citizen services faster, with fewer tax revenues and an aging population rapidly entering the welfare system. Unfortunately, hiring more people to administer these services isn’t an option for most small- to mid-sized municipalities. Many of these cities and towns also are contending with slow, error-prone legacy applications that cause frustration among citizens and government employees alike. 

“Creating a better digital future meant assembling a new IT infrastructure based on open source,” said Johan Ekberg, CEO at Apendo. “We built a hyperautomation platform that serves as sort of a middle layer between end users and each municipality’s applications. Ideally, with open source technology, these municipalities can share applications for common citizen services, saving both time and money.” 

Bringing Hyperautomation Together with AI

Central to the platform was an end-to-end process automation and orchestration solution powered by Camunda. Based on the open source standard Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), Camunda helps municipalities automate processes using the applications of their choice, depending on the unique needs of their citizens. 

The platform works with both legacy and modern applications, enabling cities and towns to automate any process and orchestrate related processes together. For example, if a citizen registers for a driver’s license and also registers to vote at the same time, Camunda will orchestrate the flow of data between the registry of motor vehicles and the local voting authority. The platform also includes an AI-powered digital assistant powered by IBM Watson, which allows citizens to ask questions and get answers, without having to contact the local call center or government office.

The Karlskrona Municipality Vision

One of the first users of the Apendo Camunda municipality model is Karlskrona, a municipality in Blekinge County in southern Sweden with around 66,000 residents. The municipality had ambitious digital transformation goals, and wanted to bridge the gap between residents and the variety of applications and services they needed to access. Using BPMN as a common process modeling language, the municipality designed a series of processes that delivered services directly to its citizens with less need for municipal employees’ intervention.

Using Camunda as the orchestration technology between different applications, the municipality was able to use their existing tools, while adopting new open source solutions. The opportunity to use open source helped save Karlskrona money, by leveraging existing tools that other municipalities in Sweden had already developed. Using Camunda, the development team for Karlskrona designed a series of workflows for both internal and external processes.

“The ability to model, simulate, build, and run tasks in Camunda is every business developer’s dream,” said Per-Olav Gramstad, Business Developer, Karlskrona. “We now have new opportunities to shape the tools that shape us, tapping into the power of open source code through secure APIs. Camunda also helps us achieve our vision to become a more data-driven municipality, allowing us to securely share data between applications or services when it’s necessary to do so.”

AI and Process Automation Improves Services with Fewer Resources

Overall, the Apendo platform is helping its pilot municipalities work with their existing employees to deliver faster, more efficient digital services to citizens. The easy-to-use, open automation platform powered by Camunda allows cities and towns to work with the technology they have, leverage open source components wherever possible, and securely share data between services to create effective process workflows.

With a clear pricing model based on the number of citizens or employees using the platform, cities can more easily predict costs, helping with budgetary constraints. The future vision is to create a set of shared national open source applications that accelerate the delivery of digital citizen services across the country. 

“By bringing together AI and end-to-end process orchestration through Camunda, we allow municipal employees to focus on higher value tasks,” Ekberg said. “End users access the platform either through vertical applications or the municipality’s website. With Camunda’s end-to-end process orchestration capabilities, municipalities can gain quick control over their processes, and the solution runs efficiently and intuitively with the IBM Watson-powered chat interface.”

The post Building Smarter Cities with Process Automation appeared first on Camunda.

But innovation never stops and organizations continue to look for new ways to increase the velocity of business transformation. To address this need, more and more organizations are turning to the cloud, which is increasingly becoming a business transformation accelerator. 

That being said, as enterprise applications are being built entirely in the cloud, organizations are struggling with automating processes across multiple systems, people, and devices in an end-to-end manner. These processes often include modern components such as microservices and serverless architectures, as well as distributed and high-throughput applications. Development teams are finding it time-consuming and cumbersome to build and run their own Process Automation environments, adding significant cost and delays to their application development timelines.

In a world where organizations have come to expect the simplicity and efficiency of Cloud-based, fully managed services, Process Automation is no exception. We therefore want to provide an enterprise-scale Process Automation as a Service solution that is truly transformative and lives up to the expectations of our “cloud-first” customers and users. That’s why we’re excited to announce the General Availability of Camunda Cloud.

Camunda Cloud

Camunda Cloud is an enterprise SaaS solution for end-to-end Process Automation built from the ground up for the cloud. It is based on the ISO standard BPMN and includes a horizontally scalable workflow engine along with built-in components for collaborative modeling, operations, and analytics.

As a fully managed Process Automation as a Service, it provides push-button deployment and is ideal for enterprise development teams that need instant access to highly scalable process automation services for their mission-critical applications. Being built for the Cloud means a flexible, open architecture which easily fits into existing environments, while also running on Kubernetes with loosely coupled building blocks that can be deployed and scaled individually, making it effortless to scale for Cloud native applications.

Just like Camunda Platform, Camunda Cloud puts developers centerstage — it is built to improve developer productivity with built-in integrations for a broad range of programming languages and tools.

As I said in my recent keynote at Camunda Community Summit: We believe that Camunda Cloud will accelerate how organizations will be able to adopt process automation in a way that will be highly developer-friendly, but at the same time, will remove heavy operational burdens. 

To enable organizations even more and help them to accelerate their Process Automation journey, we have engineered a Cloud native stack that covers the full automation lifecycle:

• Collaborative process design for business & IT with human-readable graphical models based on the ISO-standard BPMN 2.0.
• Horizontally scalable workflow orchestration powered by a new class of BPMN workflow engine that delivers true horizontal scalability and enables high-performance use cases that were once beyond the realm of workflow automation.
• Process visibility & monitoring for mission-critical processes that span multiple systems and services. With tools designed for teams to manage, monitor, troubleshoot running workflow instances. 
• On demand and scalable with native Kubernetes integration to easily create and manage all workflow clusters. Deploy processes at the push of a button, scale to meet needs, monitor cluster health and control organizational settings.
• Built in gRPC integration supports a broad range of programming languages including Java, C#, Node.js, Ruby, Rust and Golang. 
• Support for a variety of process use cases including microservices orchestration, serverless function orchestration (e.g. AWS Lambda), human workflow management, and end-to-end Process Automation across people, systems, and devices.

Proven in Production

Camunda Cloud has been built with significant input from customers who have already deployed the solution in production environments during an extensive public beta period and an early access program. Camunda Cloud is being used globally for various use cases. athenahealth is using it to automate its messaging campaigns:

“We needed to orchestrate and automate the millions of messages that we send out on a daily basis. Camunda Cloud provides the advanced workflow and high throughput capabilities we need while making it easy for us to run millions of process instances at any given time.”

Kunal Shrestha, Director of Product Management, athenahealth.

Mineko is another example:

“Using BPMN improves maintainability of the orchestration. We can show all orchestration models to our colleagues and stakeholders without having problems explaining it.”

Felix Jordan, CTO, Mineko

If you’d like to see more of the amazing projects our early adopters have built, read how MINEKO is orchestrating AWS lambdas with Camunda Cloud.

Availability

We’re making Camunda Cloud available immediately, and on demand at camunda.com/cloud. It will be available in three distinct plans: 

• The Free trial plan which provides users the ability to easily get started modeling and deploying processes in Camunda Cloud. It includes the entire Camunda Cloud feature set along with Community support.
• The Professional plan which is designed with self-service in mind, and provides a quick and easy entry point for a paid subscription that’s ideal for small teams to get started with Camunda Cloud. It comes at a base price of USD $990/month and is billed annually. This base price includes predefined Process Instances, Task Users, and a pre-configured set of cloud hardware resources. Please visit the Professional plan FAQ for more details. It also includes 8×5 support in your timezone. Additional Process Instances, Task Users and cloud resources are available based on consumption pricing.
• The Enterprise plan, which is ideal for organizations looking to automate several of their business processes. It can scale effortlessly to support a large number of monthly process instances, includes enterprise SLAs and 24×7 support. 

Camunda Cloud is immediately available on-demand at camunda.com/cloud.

You can read more about Camunda Cloud in our release blog and don’t forget to let us know what you think — your feedback shapes our products and we’re looking forward to hearing what you have to say and learning more about what you’re building with Camunda Cloud. You can easily reach us on the Camunda Forum or get in touch with us via our website.

The post Introducing Camunda Cloud – Industry-First Process Automation as a Service appeared first on Camunda.

Share a catalog of reusable workers and RPA bots in your team

To connect Camunda to a back-end system or another endpoint, you can build a custom integration, which we call a “worker.” Building a worker is usually a task for a professional software developer; but once a worker is built, the ability to reuse it becomes a huge time-saver for other developers throughout the organization. Reusability boosts developer productivity, and it can dramatically reduce time-to-implementation for process automation projects. 

Cawemo allows developers to share reusable worker templates through its Catalog. Camunda Platform 7.15 enhances the Catalog with powerful features that make worker templates more robust and easier to share. Now, a developer can specify all necessary input parameters, output parameters, and possible errors for each template — including conditional handling of BPMN errors that reduces coupling between the worker and the BPMN process. There’s built-in version control for templates, and user-controlled template sharing between Cawemo and Modeler ensures smooth collaboration for everyone.

The result: Teams can develop a shareable template library that eliminates rework and helps low-code developers deliver working automated processes faster.

Orchestrate Automation Anywhere bots

Camunda Platform 7.14 introduced an out-of-the-box integration with UiPath via our RPA Bridge and a user-friendly interface for orchestrating UiPath bots as part of BPMN processes. Camunda Platform 7.15 continues to make life easier for RPA engineers by adding RPA Bridge support for Automation Anywhere. This release also offers premade templates that help you quickly get started with orchestrating Automation Anywhere bots. You can use the Cawemo Catalog to manage and share these templates in your team and across teams.

The result: Greater return on your RPA investment through bot orchestration projects that low-code developers can implement quickly, with flexibility for future modernization.

Enhanced process analytics and dashboards

Most organizations have core business processes that span across many different systems or services, which leads to fragmented, disjointed process execution. When processes are fragmented, it’s hard to see how they’re performing from the time they start to the time they finish, which means teams struggle to pinpoint and solve problems, and they lack the data they need to improve processes. Optimize solves this problem by providing end-to-end monitoring and reporting for processes that are executed by Camunda Platform or by other automation tools. Camunda Platform 7.15 makes it easier to quickly build Optimize reports using a refreshed report builder interface and more powerful filtering options, including incident status and assignee.

Also, you can now create reports based on multiple metrics; for example, number of process instances and average process instance duration. Process performance is often influenced by multiple factors, so being able to view multiple metrics in one report ensures you get a complete view of process performance.

The result: Instant insight into process performance, even in complex environments.

Improved team collaboration for DMN

The DMN standard is a common language that business users, low-code developers, and professional software developers can use to model business decisions and implement decision tables. With Camunda Platform 7.15, you can create, edit, and publish DMN decision tables in Cawemo, so it’s easier than ever to take advantage of DMN for decision automation. We’ve also improved the usability of the DMN interface in Cawemo and Modeler, benefitting anyone who works with large, complex decision tables.

The result: Faster development of DMN decision tables and less risk of human error when working with large decision tables.

Learn more

You can find more information in the blog post for each module:

• Camunda Platform Runtime 7.15
• Modeler 4.5
• Modeler 4.7
• Cawemo 1.5
• Cawemo 1.6
• Optimize 3.3
• Optimize 3.4

Join the Camunda Platform 7.15 release webinar on April 20

Join Camunda experts as we discuss the advantages of Camunda Platform 7.15 in our April 20 webinar.

The Camunda Community Summit 2021 is coming, April 27-28

The Camunda Community Summit is a unique, interactive event for developers, enterprise architects, and process automation experts. It’s your opportunity to deep-dive into the technical details of the Camunda Platform 7.15 release, together with the Camunda team. Register for free today.

The post Camunda Platform 7.15 Released appeared first on Camunda.

Global companies like Deutsche Telekom have already introduced and automated 2,500 individual bots, resulting in savings of more than 100 million Euros. However, relying too heavily on RPA can land you in hot water. Paul Jones, Business Automation Services at NatWest even classifies RPA as technical debt. 

So what can you do to avoid this debt? Prevention is the best cure and before jumping on the RPA bandwagon, think carefully about whether you need an RPA solution, or a workflow engine.

Losing control of long-running processes

The ability to automate and orchestrate long-running processes end-to-end is essential for business continuity and customer experience alike. But to do this, you need state handling and persistence — the ability to wait, either for users to complete a task, a timer to expire, or perhaps an external event to occur. 

RPA tools are not able to handle such orchestration end-to-end because they are designed to be synchronous. As a result you would always have to ‘chop up’ your end-to-end processes into individual pieces, triggered by intermediary actions. This makes it hard to see the overall flow and easily lose track of important processes.

Equally, you can’t afford to lose state if things go wrong. In order to manage a long-running process, you require certain features, such as the ability to repair and retry a failed instance, like timeouts and escalations when your processes get stuck. You also need to consider version migration, especially if old versions of that process are still running. RPA tools often don’t provide such features.

If you’re relying on an RPA tool alone, you’ll struggle to handle long-running processes end-to-end. Instead you’ll require a workflow engine that can persist state and provide mechanisms to track time and trigger time-related events. This is easily managed by Camunda, which supports standard BPMN 2.0 timer events, allowing you to react on dates, durations and cycles, and gives you freedom to handle these situations in the right way for your business. Camunda is also able to migrate state across versions.

Overlooking external events

In most processes, it is imperative to be able to react to something happening outside of the  process. For example, a customer may cancel an order while it is being processed by the warehouse and the process needs to react to this by making sure the order is not shipped.

In order to implement this, you need the ability to listen for and notify processes of events that are happening outside. Because RPA technologies are not designed to interact with external events, you run the risk of missing vital updates to your processes.

However, Camunda implements message events, for example to start or interrupt processes, which specifically wait for external events to happen to trigger actions. Camunda goes further by providing a Message-API via Java and REST, which can be used to integrate with other messaging systems like Kafka or RabbitMQ, giving you a unified event architecture.

Lack of Orchestration

RPA users should be able to choose the right RPA technology for their use case, combining tools as needed. Let’s imagine you have a process where the first step involves accessing data in a legacy mainframe user interface — an ideal RPA use case. Then for the next step of the process, you need to interact with a modern web-based user interface. You can easily use two specialized RPA tools to manage this. 

However, what you can’t do is orchestrate the workflow itself. This is where a workflow engine, able to integrate different RPA technologies from different vendors, is the better approach. 

Another point to dwell on is visibility. RPA tools typically lack the process layer, which is essential for cross-tool integration and facilitates transparent, end-to-end visibility of a process across different RPA vendors. This can lead users into vendor lock-in situations.

RPA or Workflow Engine?

Technical debt can be a millstone around your neck. That’s why it’s essential to use the right tool for the job. There are advantages to both RPA and workflow engines, and choosing the right technology really boils down to your use case. 

RPA excels as a tactical solution to automate individual tasks but really should not be used to automate core business processes. Instead, it should be viewed as part of your strategic journey towards a modern IT infrastructure, with sound APIs and other integration points.

If you’d like to learn more about how leading enterprises are successfully blending RPA and workflow automation, as part of their digital transformation, join Marco Einacker, VP IT Services, Deutsche Telekom, free at CamundaCon LIVE 2020.2 this October 8th, where he’ll be presenting his company’s RPA strategy: Bots and process improvements at the same time – is that possible? 

The post Three hidden threats of RPA technical debt you might have overlooked appeared first on Camunda.

Since we first announced Camunda Cloud at CamundaCon Berlin last year, we’ve gained valuable insight from our early adopters in our private and public betas. We’ve poured these insights into developing a robust BPMN-based workflow technology engineered specifically for the cloud, based on our horizontally scalable workflow engineering Zeebe, and available as an on-demand cloud service.

Our early access program includes a number of new capabilities to ensure you can seamlessly design, automate and monitor processes as a team, scaling as needed:

Single-AZ replication – fault tolerant Zeebe brokers protect your workloads from outages.

Add Production Clusters as needed – provision more Zeebe clusters at the click of a button.

Operate – built specifically for monitoring and managing workflows running in Camunda Cloud, Operate gives end-to-end visibility and control of workflows.

We’re also including dedicated professional support for the first time, between 08:00 – 17:00 CEST (Berlin), so you can collaborate closely with our highly skilled team to make your projects successful.

You can sign up for the Early Access Program here and check out the Zeebe Forum, where our active community discusses all aspects of our Camunda Cloud and Zeebe products.

If you’d like to see some of the amazing projects our early adopters have built, read how MINEKO is orchestrating AWS lambdas with Camunda Cloud.

Plus you can watch my presentation at CamundaCon Live, where I introduce Camunda Cloud alongside new functionality within our product stack including Camunda BPM Run – our new distribution to run Camunda as a standalone orchestration engine; and Optimize 3.0 – End-to-End Process Events Monitoring.

The post Introducing the Camunda Cloud Early Access Program appeared first on Camunda.

Last September at CamundaCon Berlin, we unveiled Camunda Cloud: a scalable, on-demand workflow platform. Camunda Cloud is the first BPMN-based workflow technology that’s been engineered specifically for the cloud and offered as an on-demand cloud service. It was a major milestone for our company.

For the past five months, we’ve been running a private beta of Camunda Cloud with a limited number of users. During this time, our Cloud team has gained valuable user input and made great strides with the core Camunda Cloud platform.

We’ve expanded the range of business and technical problems that users can solve with Camunda Cloud, with Zeebe (the horizontally scalable workflow engine at the heart of Camunda Cloud) and Operate (a tool that was purpose-built for monitoring and managing workflows running in Camunda Cloud) adding many new capabilities.

Today, we’re excited to take the next step with Camunda Cloud and announce the Camunda Cloud Public Beta. This means we’ve opened up the beta to everyone – there’s no more limit to the number of users who can participate.

You can sign up for the public beta here.

And we’re also excited to announce our first-ever Camunda Cloud webinar on Wednesday, February 5, at 5pm CET / 11am EST. Camunda CTO Daniel Meyer will be joined by members of the Camunda Cloud engineering and Zeebe developer relations teams to dive into Camunda Cloud’s capabilities and, of course, to share a live demo. There will also be plenty of time for attendees to ask questions.

You can register for the webinar here.

If you already signed up for the private beta but haven’t yet been granted access, you can simply sign up for the public beta to get started right away. Please note that we won’t auto-enroll users who were on the private beta waitlist.

As a public beta user, you can play a key role in shaping the future of Camunda Cloud and we’re eager to hear your feedback. So take a look and let us know what you think.

The post Announcing the Camunda Cloud Public Beta: Workflow Engineered for the Cloud (For Everyone!) appeared first on Camunda.

Mary is very well known in the Developer Relations Community. Besides other initiatives, she has written the book The Business Value of Developer Relations, she is publishing the DevRel Weekly Newsletter and co-hosts Community Pulse, a DevRel focused podcast.

At Camunda, Mary will lead our new Developer Relations and Community team. She will
work together very closely with product development as well as the open source community ensuring we continue to make Camunda the go-to workflow and decision automation stack for developers.

Please join me in welcoming Mary to the Camunda Community!

Get the full scoop in Mary’s Blogpost.

The post Mary Thengvall joins Camunda appeared first on Camunda.

Zeebe advertises itself as being a “horizontally-scalable workflow engine”. In this post, we cover what that means and how to measure it.

What is horizontal scalability?

(In case you are familiar with the basic concept of horizontal scalability, you can just skip this section.)

Scalability is an answer to the question, “How can I can get my system to process a bigger workload?”

In general, there are two approaches to scalability:

• Scaling the system vertically by beefing up the machine that runs the system by adding more processing power (CPU, memory, disk, …)
• Scaling the system horizontally by using more (usually smaller) machines that run as a cluster

A system is said to be horizontally scalable if adding more machines to the cluster yields a proportional increase in throughput.

The test setup

Zeebe is designed to be a horizontally scalable system. In the following sections, we’ll show you how to measure that.

In our test, we run the infrastructure on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) in Google Cloud:

There are three components:

• Load generator: a Java program that embeds the Zeebe client and simply starts workflow instances
• Zeebe cluster: a cluster of Zeebe brokers which we scale to different sizes to understand the relationship between cluster size and performance
• Monitoring infrastructure: while the test is running, Prometheus is used to collect metrics from the Zeebe cluster and expose them via a dashboard in Grafana

The workload

In the test, we deploy a simple BPMN process that has a start event, service task and and end event.

The Load Generator then starts workflow instances by executing the following command:

zeebe.newCreateInstanceCommand()
  .bpmnProcessId("benchmark-process")
  .latestVersion()
  .send();

Resources assigned to the brokers

The Zeebe brokers are defined as a stateful set in Kubernetes. We assign:

• 16 GB of ram
• 500 GB of SSD storage
• 7 CPU cores

The results

To measure horizontal scalability, we test using the same workload while gradually increasing the number of brokers and partitions:

The following chart shows that Zeebe currently exhibits a nice linear scalability behavior. As we add more brokers, we observe a proportional increase in throughput, as visualized in the following chart:

The following is a screenshot from Grafana which shows the individual test runs:

Conclusion

This post is just a quick overview of what horizontal scalability in Zeebe means. Please note that even though Zeebe is now available as a production ready release, it is still at a stage where it has a lot of potential for performance optimization. We expect “per broker” performance to improve over time, and this is certainly a topic we’ll invest in on an ongoing basis.

“Workflow instances started per second” is just one of many performance metrics that are important to users–this certainly wasn’t a comprehensive look at Zeebe’s performance characteristics. And as is the case with any benchmark blog post, this provides just one “point in time” snapshot measuring performance of a particular version of Zeebe.

The main takeaway, and what we wanted to demonstrate here, is that we can already see that the system can scale linearly as expected when adding more brokers. Which is awesome!

When it comes to performance, we’re always curious to hear what users are seeing, too, so feel free to let us know if you have any feedback via either of the channels below.

Have a question about Zeebe? Drop by the Slack channel or Zeebe user forum.

The post Scaling Zeebe Horizontally: A Simple Benchmark appeared first on Camunda.

This blog post is a quick overview of why and how we did that.

Why we created Zeebe

About 6 years ago, Camunda entered the workflow space with a new approach to BPM. While our approach was very successful, it was foreseeable that something big was coming that would transform the tech landscape: microservices and distributed systems.

To meet an ever-growing need to define new business models and disrupt existing ones, companies must scale software development. If software is eating the world, then microservices and distributed systems are the forks and knives of that digital transformation.

It was clear to me that this migration to microservices architectures could only succeed if we figured out the right way of implementing workflows and business processes in this new distributed reality. However, this was such a radical change that it was not going to be sufficient to simply re-apply existing solutions to new problems. Something fundamentally new was needed and that came to be Zeebe.

(For a more in-depth overview, Read Mike’s post: Workflows Are Everywhere.)

How Zeebe is different

Zeebe puts one thing front and center, and then everything else naturally follows from there: Events!

In distributed microservices architectures, events are the new first class citizens. Events make it possible to record and publish state changes in one domain (microservice) such that other domains (microservices) can subscribe and react to them. This simple yet powerful principle decouples microservices from each other and introduces scalability and reproducibility. However, a problem that was not yet solved well is how to coordinate many (tens to hundreds) of actions implemented by different microservices to achieve a specific outcome. Or in other words: how to implement complex workflows. As the complexity grows, it becomes increasingly important to have visibility into such flows

And Zeebe provides exactly this – the ability to execute, manage, and monitor workflows that span across microservices and need to be scaled massively in the cloud.

Zeebe interprets workflow on top of event streams. Event streams flow into Zeebe (it is very easy to subscribe to external events from a workflow) and event streams flow out of Zeebe (as it processes workflows, it exports a complete event log into external systems). Given this event-driven way of interacting with the external world, it is only logical that Zeebe builds on top of stream processing internally, instead of a database. This simple fact is what makes Zeebe unique and completely different from any other workflow engine out there that we are aware of. It is at the core of Zeebe’s cloud native architecture, enabling it to scale horizontally, be fault tolerant through replication, and integrate natively into microservices architectures.

It only took me about 2 years to figure out how to do that, and then it only took some of the smartest people I know 2 more years to build it for real. And now, it is finally here! : )

If this has piqued your interest, you can read about the architecture in much more detail in Bernd’s excellent posts:

• Zeebe.io — a horizontally scalable distributed workflow engine
• How we built a highly scalable distributed state machine

The post Zeebe: Workflow Reinvented for Microservices and the Cloud (From Idea To Production Readiness) appeared first on Camunda.