A company’s core business processes nearly always span more than one microservice. In an e-commerce company, for example, a “customer order” might involve different services for payments, inventory, shipping and more. But how do these services play together to fulfill the customer’s desire? Implementing long-running, asynchronous, and complex collaborations between distributed microservices is challenging. How can we ensure visibility of cross-microservice flows and provide status and error monitoring? How do we guarantee that overall flows always complete, even if single services fail? Or how do we recognize stuck flows so that we can fix them? In this webinar, Bernd will explain how workflow automation supports the orchestration of microservices, to make sure business processes are always carried out - even in case of failure - providing monitoring and visibility into the overall progress and status. He will reveal how to do all of this without introducing monolithic workflows that clash with microservices principles. You will also learn how to balance orchestration (using a workflow engine) with choreography (using events). Still believe that choreography is more loosely coupled and thus the modern way to go? You definitely need to listen in…

1. Monitoring & Orchestrating Your
Microservices Landscape using
Workflow Automaton
11 March 2020

2. 2
Today’s Presenter
Bernd Ruecker
Co-founder &
Chief Technologist,
Camunda
@berndruecker
http://berndruecker.io/

3. 3
Housekeeping
• The webinar is being recorded
• The recording and slides will be
made available after the webinar
• Please post questions via the
GoToWebinar control panel

4. Monitoring & Orchestrating
Your Microservices Landscape
using Workflow Automation
@berndruecker

5. Software is
eating the
world.
Marc Andreessen,
Entrepreneur &
Investor
2011 in „The Wall
Street Journal“
„
Photo by techcrunch, available under Creative Commons BY 2.0 license.

6. “We are a Tech
Company”
Goldman Sachs CEO
Lloyd Blankfein
6
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-02-15/lloyd-blankfein-wants-goldman-sachs-to-push-technology

7. 7
Today, every company is becoming a software
company and developers are at the center of
digital transformation; they drive business
processes and functions across organizations
from customer service and HR to marketing and
IT. And the choices these developers make will
increasingly determine value creation and
growth across every industry.
https://news.microsoft.com/2018/06/04/microsoft-to-acquire-github-for-7-5-billion/

8. Traditional enterprises
cannot relax!
8
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mayrarodriguezvalladares/2019/02/14/
bigtech-poses-a-greater-threat-to-financial-institutions-than-fintech/

9. Change is the only constant
„ We don‘t know what we will need tomorrow.
But we do know that we will need something.
We have to be able to move quickly!
CIO of a German insurance company in 2019

10. And you?

11. Credit Card
Handling
Payment
RESTOrder
Fulfillment
REST
DBPaymentId Amount Status
1 100 $ Collected
2 125 $ Open
Reporting of
overdue payments
{script}
Fixing open
payments
Scheduler to
process open
payments
Damn it – we
need a date!
…to be continued…

12. Wild West Integration

13. “People were saying that
groups needed to communicate
more.
Jeff got up and said, ‘No,
communication is terrible!’ ”
https://www.fastcompany.com/50106/inside-mind-jeff-bezos-5

14. Some
Service
Some
Service
Some
Service
Some
Service
Some
Service
Some
Service
Some
Service
Autonomous Microservices…

16. Simplified example:
dash button
Photo by 0xF2, available under Creative Commons BY-ND 2.0
license. https://www.flickr.com/photos/0xf2/29873149904/
@berndruecker

17. Three steps…
@berndruecker

18. (Micro-)services
Checkout
Payment
Inventory
Shipment
@berndruecker

19. Order
Placed
Payment
Received
Goods
Fetched
Notification
Checkout
Payment
Inventory
Shipment
Event-driven architecture
@berndruecker

20. Peer-to-peer event chains
Checkout
Payment
Inventory
Shipment
Order
placed
Payment
received
Goods
shipped
Goods
fetched
@berndruecker

21. Peer-to-peer event chains
Checkout
Payment
Inventory
Shipment
Order
placed
Payment
received
Goods
shipped
Goods
fetched
@berndruecker

22. The danger is that it's very easy to make
nicely decoupled systems with event
notification, without realizing that you're
losing sight of that larger-scale flow, and
thus set yourself up for trouble in future
years.
https://martinfowler.com/articles/201701-event-driven.html
@berndruecker

23. The danger is that it's very easy to make
nicely decoupled systems with event
notification, without realizing that you're
losing sight of that larger-scale flow, and
thus set yourself up for trouble in future
years.
https://martinfowler.com/articles/201701-event-driven.html
@berndruecker

24. The danger is that it's very easy to make
nicely decoupled systems with event
notification, without realizing that you're
losing sight of that larger-scale flow, and
thus set yourself up for trouble in future
years.
https://martinfowler.com/articles/201701-event-driven.html
@berndruecker

25. Phil Calcado at QCon NYC 2019

26. API
API
API
API
API
API
API
Microservices
External Services
Standard Software
„What the hell just happened?“
@berndruecker

27. Process Events Monitoring
Camunda
Optimize
Order
placed
Payment
received
Goods
fetched
Goods
shipped
@berndruecker
Order
placed
Payment
received
Goods
fetched
Goods
shipped

28. Demo

30. Peer-to-peer event chains
Checkout
Payment
Inventory
Shipment
Order
placed
Payment
received
Goods
shipped
Goods
fetched
Fetch the goods
before the
payment
@berndruecker

31. Peer-to-peer event chains
Checkout
Payment
Inventory
Shipment
Fetch the goods
before the
payment
Goods
fetched
Order
placed
Payment
received
Goods
shipped
@berndruecker

32. What we wanted
Photo by Lijian Zhang, available under Creative Commons SA 2.0 License and P..19 / CC BY-SA 4.0
@berndruecker

33. Order
Extract the end-to-end responsibility
Checkout
Payment
Inventory
ShipmentPayment
received
Order
placed
Retrieve
payment
@berndruecker

34. Order
Events & Commands
Checkout
Payment
Inventory
ShipmentPayment
received
Order
placed
Retrieve
payment
@berndruecker
Event
Command
Fact,
happened in the past,
immutable
Intend,
Want s.th. to happen

35. Order
It is not about the protocol!
Checkout
Payment
Inventory
Shipment
Order
placed
Retrieve
payment
It can still be messaging!
@berndruecker

36. Order
It is about where to decide about the coupling!
Checkout
Payment
Inventory
Shipment
Order
placed
Retrieve
payment
Order decides
. to listen to the event
. to issue the command
@berndruecker

37. Order
Checkout
Payment
Inventory
Shipment

38. Demo

39. Zalando does
Sales-Order & Order-Fulfillment
or every order worldwide
via Camunda
@berndruecker

40. Workflows live inside service boundaries
@berndruecker

41. No BPM(N) monoliths
https://blog.bernd-ruecker.com/avoiding-the-bpm-monolith-when-using-bounded-contexts-d86be6308d8
@berndruecker

42. Order
Checkout
Payment
Inventory
Shipment
Credit
Card
Let‘s briefly look at payments again
Customer
Credits
REST
REST

43. BPMN enables long running interactions

44. BPMN enables long running interactions
Do it reliably!
Stateful
retry
Restore
consistency

45. BPMN enables long running interactions

46. BPMN enables long running interactions

47. BPMN enables the Saga pattern

48. BPMN enables the Saga pattern

49. The payment workflow

50. Can your company
leverage your
hipster architecture?
Shutterstock
You need to
change business
processes and
customer
experience!

51. Example
@berndruecker

52. Example
@berndruecker
sync

53. Example
@berndruecker

54. It is hard to implement
Payment
Seat
ReservationBooking
Ticket
Generation
REST

55. It is hard to implement
Payment
Seat
ReservationBooking
Ticket
Generation
REST

56. Typical pattern
Payment
Seat
ReservationBooking
Ticket
Generation
REST
Simulate synchronicty by waiting
(callback or polling)

57. @berndruecker
happy
case
failure
case
Redesign your business process accordingly!
Or some interface
to poll for status
Sync in happy case
Async response

58. @berndruecker
Redesign your business process accordingly!

59. Summary
• Business agility is essential to survive, this is the case for
microservices
• The challenges move to the collaboration of the services
• Balance orchestration and choreography
• Workflow engines enable long running services, Saga and help
taiming distributed systems

60. Thank you!
@berndruecker

61. Get started today!
https://github.com/berndruecker/flowing-retail
More info about Camunda
and enterprise edition trial:
http://camunda.com/

62. 85
About Camunda
Camunda innovates process automation with a developer-friendly approach
that is standards-based, highly scalable and collaborative for business & IT
85
Founded
2008
Employees
200+ Worldwide offices:
America, Asia & Europe
5
Countries with people
using Camunda
190+
Community Members
100,000+
Enterprise Customers
300+

63. 8686
Camunda is helping
NASA go to Mars!
2020

64. 87
Camunda Customers
87
InsuranceFinancial
Services
Telco Technology ‘Startups’Media

65. Q&A

66. Thank you