Presentation given by Thorben Lindhauer and Daniel Meyer at Camunda Night at Zalando Inno Lab https://www.meetup.com/Zalando-Tech-Events-Berlin/events/242890035/

1. Zeebe - Microservice Orchestration at any Scale
Thorben Lindhauer
Daniel Meyer

2. • 140 customers in 18 countries
• > 85% of customers use Camunda for core business processes
• Company revenue in growth 2016: 82%
• > 70 Employees
Camunda
AT&T

3. Meet Zeebe
“Zeebe” a new Microservice Orchestration Engine that we have written completely from scratch.
Zeebe is Open Source and available at
• https://zeebe.io (Website)
• https://github.com/zeebe-io (Github)

4. Outline
Overview of Zeebe
Resilient Service Orchestration and Choreography
Workflow Introspection for Dev, Ops and Biz
Performance
Q&A

5. Client / Server
Broker
Broker
Broker
Broker
Broker
Zeebe
Cluster
Zeebe
Client Connect
My App
Golang

6. Distributed System
Peer to Peer
No single point of failure
No single choking point
Broker
Broker
Broker
Broker
Broker
Zeebe
Cluster

7. Scale Elastically
UP
DOWN
3 Nodes 30 Nodes
SCALE

8. Cloud Native
docker run -p 51015:51015 camunda/zeebe:0.2.0
k8s: https://github.com/zeebe-io/zeebe-operator

9. BPMN Workflows
• Distribute Work
• Handle Events
• Allow Asynchronous Processing
• Provide Visibility

10. YAML Workflows

11. Connecting Microservices
Watermark
Service
Thumbnail
Service
subscribe

12. Data Flow
Zeebe uses JSON format for data / payload
{…} {…} {…}
Initial payload document is
provided to the workflow
Payload document “travels”
through the workflow. Tasks can
read / write it.

13. Audit / History Log
Generate Event Stream
As Zeebe advances through a Workflow Instance, it generates a stream of events.
This event stream is both history but also “drives the execution forward”.
Internally Zeebe works as an Event Sourcing System.

14. Persistence
- Persistence uses local filesystem on broker nodes
- “log streams”:
- log-structured (append-only) and consumed/processed as stream with option to
replay
- Format is Message-Pack (binary JSON) with custom binary framing
- Format is optimized for linear read / write and throughput levels at hardware I/O
bandwidth limit
See: https://github.com/zeebe-io/zb-logstreams

15. Replication
Log Streams are replicated across brokers using raft protocol
See: https://github.com/zeebe-io/zb-raft
Broker
2
Broker
1
Broker
3
Client

16. Outline
Overview of Zeebe
Resilient Service Orchestration and Choreography
Workflow Introspection for Dev, Ops and Biz
Performance
Q&A

17. Resilience is the ability of a system to adapt or keep working when challenges
occur.
Ines Sombra, Architectural Patterns of Resilient Distributed Systems, Strangeloop 2015

18. A Distributed System
Zeebe Broker
Service A Service BWatermark
Service
Thumbnail
Service

19. Service not Available
Zeebe Broker
Service A Service BWatermark
Service
Thumbnail
Service

20. Controlled Service Failure
Zeebe Broker
Service A Service BWatermark
Service
Thumbnail
Service

21. Silent Service Failure
Zeebe Broker
Service A Service BWatermark
Service
Thumbnail
Service

22. Zeebe‘s Event Stream
E.g.:
• Workflow instantiated
• Workflow instance completed
• Task created
• Task completed
• Task failed
1001 10031002 1004 1005 ……

23. Publish/Subscribe
Thumbnail Service
push
1001 1003
Thumbnail
Task
Created
1002
1004 1005 ……

24. Publish/Subscribe
Thumbnail Service
push
…
complete
1001 1003
Thumbnail
Task
Created
1002
1004
Thumbnail
Task
Completed
1005
……

25. Publish/Subscribe – Task Lifecycle
CREATED COMPLETED

26. Publish/Subscribe – Task Lifecycle
CREATED COMPLETED
LOCKED

27. Publish/Subscribe – Task Lifecycle
CREATED COMPLETED
LOCKED
Exclusive for a single subscriber

28. Service not Available
Zeebe Broker
Service A Service BWatermark
Service
Thumbnail
Service

29. Controlled Service Failure
Zeebe Broker
Service A Service BWatermark
Service
Thumbnail
Service

30. Publish/Subscribe – Task Lifecycle
CREATED COMPLETED
LOCKED

31. Publish/Subscribe – Task Lifecycle
CREATED COMPLETED
LOCKEDFAILED
retries > 0
retries == 0

32. Publish/Subscribe – Task Lifecycle
CREATED COMPLETED
LOCKEDFAILED
Management
operation
retries > 0
retries == 0

33. Silent Service Failure
Zeebe Broker
Service A Service BWatermark
Service
Thumbnail
Service

34. Publish/Subscribe – Task Lifecycle
CREATED COMPLETED
LOCKEDFAILED
retries > 0
retries == 0

35. Outline
Overview of Zeebe
Resilient Service Orchestration and Choreography
Workflow Introspection for Dev, Ops and Biz
Performance
Q&A

36. Workflow Introspection
Technical Responsibility: Do all our workflows work from start to end?
Business Responsibility: Do our workflows do the right things? Are they efficient?

37. Do all my workflows work from start to end?
Microservice monitoring
• Load metrics
• Error logs
• …
Worfklow monitoring
• Are tasks piling up?
• Is manual intervention required?
• …

38. Do all my workflows work from start to end?
1001 10031002 1004 1005 ……

39. Do all my workflows work from start to end?
1001 10031002
Thumbnail
Task
Created
1004
Thumbnail
Task
Created
1005
……

40. Do all my workflows work from start to end?
2
1001 10031002
Thumbnail
Task
Created
1004
Thumbnail
Task
Created
1005
……

41. 2
Do all my workflows work from start to end?
1
1002
Thumbnail
Task
Created
1004
1003
Thumbnail
Task
Created
1005
Thumbnail
Task
Failed
1006
……

43. Do my workflows do the right thing? Are they efficient?

44. Do my workflows do the right thing?
KPI: 80% of uploaded photos should be appropriate

46. Outline
Overview of Zeebe
Resilient Service Orchestration and Choreography
Workflow Introspection for Dev, Ops and Biz
Performance
Q&A

47. Zeebe vs. Traditional Workflow Engines

48. Zeebe vs. Apache Kafka

49. Zeebe is designed for Performance
Design principles:
• Batching of I/O operations
• Linear read/write data access patterns
• Compact, cache-optimized data structures
• Lock free algorithms and actor concurrency (green threads model)
• Broker is garbage-free in the hot/data path

50. Outline
Overview of Zeebe
Resilient Service Orchestration and Choreography
Workflow Introspection for Dev, Ops and Biz
Performance
Q&A

51. Q&A
zeebe.io
github.com/zeebe-io