This document discusses new IT paradigms for business process management in a microservices architecture. It explores challenges of distributed systems like asynchronous communication, distributed transactions, and handling timeouts and failures. It also discusses approaches like orchestration, choreography and event-driven architectures. The document advocates an approach where end-to-end processes are first-class citizens but the execution respects service boundaries and distributes ownership.

1. A new era calls for new
IT paradigms.
What does this mean for BPM?
bernd.ruecker@camunda.com
Co-founder and developer advocate

2. Software is
eating the
world.
Marc Andreessen,
Entrepreneur &
Investor
„

3. Applications
Platforms &
collaborating
systems

4. Do you know
Game Neverending?

5. But you
probably know
flickr?

6. to pivot | pivoted, pivoted | [Tech]

7. If you are not
embarrassed
by the first
version of your
product, you’ve
launched too
late.
Reid Hoffman,
Co-Founder LinkedIn
(and others)
„

8. Microservices: It is about speed and agility at scale
• Small components with
clear responsibilities
• Isolation
• Autonomy
• Replaceability
• Flexibility
• Experimentation
• Resilience
• Individual
scalability
DevOps, polyglott, asynchronous, reactive, message- / event-driven

9. Example
InventoryPayment ShippingCheckout
Bus

10. Example
InventoryPayment ShippingCheckout
Bus
Order
Placed
Does not
know
recepient
Does not
know
sender
Event: Fact that
happened in the past,
Immutable fact,
0..n recepients
Order
Placed

11. It is not SOA
InventoryPayment ShippingCheckout
Bus
Order
Placed
Does not
know
recepient
Does not
know
sender
Event: Fact that
happened in the past,
Immutable fact,
0..n recepients
Order
Placed
Smart endpoints
and dumb pipes

13. Distributed systems

14. Service A
Challenge: Asynchronous collaboration
Send
message
to B
Service B
Wait for
response
Timeout handling
Message correlation &
deduplication
State handling
Parallelism & merging

15. Challenge: Distributed transactions
1. book
hotel
2. book
car
3. book
flight
6.
cancel
hotel
5.
cancel
car
4. In case of
failure trigger
compensations
book
trip
Service A
Car ServiceHotel Service Flight Service
ACID-Transactions
only local in the
service contexts
Distributed
transaction via Saga
pattern using
compensating
activities

16. BPMN can help

17. BPMN can help

18. BPMN can help

19. Toolbox for distributed systems
Handling of time &
timeouts
Retry
Versioning
Compensation & Saga
Message correlation &
deduplication
Performance &
scalability

20. The microservice community
*Picture randomly taken from http://wareflo.com/2016/11/from-apis-to-microservices-workflow-orchestration-and-choreography-across-healthcare-organizations/. Not connected to statements on slide.
Orchestration…
…introduces single point of
failure…
…leads to god services…
…leads to tight coupling…
„

21. Example
InventoryPayment ShippingCheckout
Bus
Order
Placed
Decentral data
management
Event: Fact that
happened in the past,
Immutable fact,
0..n recepients
Customer
status
changed

22. End-to-end processes using eventflows?
InventoryPayment ShippingShop
Order
placed
Payment
received
Goods
fetched
Goods
shipped

23. Commanding is important
InventoryPaymentOrder ShippingShop
Bus
Order
Placed
Event: Fact that
happened in the past,
Immutable fact,
0..n recepients
Order
Placed
Command: Intend,
1 recipient.
Coupling the other
way round
Retrieve
Payment
Fetch
Goods
Ship
Goods

24. The case for orchestration

25. The end-to-end order process?

26. End-to-end processes cross microservice boundaries
Order
Inventory
Payment

27. For execution: respect boundaries and distribute ownership

28. Payment
Processes are “implementation detail” of services
Order
Distributed
orchestration

29. And
that‘s
good?

30. End-to-end processes as 1st class citizen
InventoryPaymentOrder ShippingCheckout
Core
Capabilities
Support
Capabilities
Business
Capabilities

31. Finally!

32. Order
Order
Order
Order
Architecture
Order
Engine A
Payment
Engine B
Monitoring
Human Task
Management
Coarse grained
central
monitoring
Fine grained
monitoring &
operations
(per context)
DevOps
Tec
Ops Biz
Ops
Central

34. Code:
https://github.com/berndruecker
Slides:
https://bernd-ruecker.com