Understanding Zeebe

Camunda 8 Topics Discussion & Questions
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Currently after reading introduction and parts of the docs i still do not know when i should use Zebee.
Can someone provide it on example? Could be detailed and technical :wink:

P.S. I know what BPM & Camunda is for and worked with it.
Know what microservices are and build them as well.

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I havenā€™t got a concrete example, but Iā€™ll try to answer this for everyone coming from the Camunda BPM angle.

At this point in time, Zeebe is like Camunda BPM when

  • You restrict yourself to plain standard-compliant BPMN XML (further narrowed down by Zeebeā€™s supported BPMN elements)
  • Plus external tasks
  • Plus input/output mappings
  • And nothing more

On top of that, Zeebe is designed to handle very high workloads and to scale well, and outperforms Camunda BPM in this regard.

So coming back to use cases, you can implement any use case with Zeebe that you would implement with Camunda BPM under the above constraints. It makes particularly sense, when you have workloads that require Zeebeā€™s performance.

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By the way: Congratulations and thank your for making the first post on the zeebe.io forums :tada:

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Hi Alexander,

you can use Zeebe for implementing long-running, asynchronous orchestrations of different microservices. Assume you are building a service which needs to interact with 3 other services in a sequence. You can define this workflow graphically with BPMN and deploy it to the Zeebe Broker. You can then implement 3 different Task Handlers which are called whenever one of the Tasks gets reached in the flow. If invoking a task fails, then it can be retried until it eventually succeeds.

Your feedback made me realize that we can do a better job explaining the use of Zeebe in the docs, thank you.

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Hi Daniel,

I warmly wanted to congrat you team for the good job. Keep the work going!!!

Regards

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ā€¦ like BPM for microservices :wink:
Ok thx , but then more questions i haveā€¦ Recognize that itā€™s not my urgent use case at the moment. So i keep watching :wink:

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Thank you, sounds for that perspective. Can we consider many parts be written from scratch for the cloud era?
Is it also a goal to support full set of BPMN? Or should this tool be more technical an less for business people?

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Technically Zeebe has close to nothing in common with Camunda BPM and is a new project from the bottom up.

This is a goal, but not a near-term goal. See https://github.com/zeebe-io/zeebe/blob/master/ROADMAP.md for our roadmap.

We think supporting BPMN over a propietary format is a differentiating factor for Zeebe and the value of BPMN models lies in their understanding by both business and IT people. So a long-term goal is to enable people to use Zeebe as the process engine in the BPM lifecycle. At the same time, the core of Zeebe will always be highly technical and must be operated and developed for by technical people, similar to Camunda BPM.

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while pondering a camunda bpm setup with amqp integration I was envisioning the ability to combine generic services like ā€œsend emailā€ and ā€œgenerate pdfā€ with specific processes. as such in order for these generic services to work they would require a certain set of process variables (like sender, receipient, subject, body) to work.

of course one would then need some tools to validate if any task using this service is compliant with this ā€œinterfaceā€ ā€¦ ie. provides the required parameters.

is this something that zeebe aims to address?

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