1.
Process Automation: An
Update from the Trenches
Kris Verlaenen
Principal Architect Business Automation
Red Hat
1

2.
Workflow Engine
BPMN 2.0
Process + Rule + Constraint
Management Tooling
Data + Form Modeling, BAM
Process Execution Service
Case Management
Cloud-native
Evolution of Process Automation (jBPM)

3.
Why Process Automation?
● Faster development / evolution
○ Powerful capabilities
○ Optional additional features
○ Reusable building blocks
○ Rapid prototyping
○ Adapt to change
● Developer Productivity
○ Instant developer efficiency
○ Higher-level abstractions
■ Focus on business logic
■ Hide implementation details
■ Meaningful for non-technical users as well
○ Integrated into existing developer workflow
Faster
Time to
Market

4.
Why Process Automation?
● Optimized
○ Scalability
○ Performance
○ Embeddable vs. service
○ Cloud-native
● Technology enabler
○ Integration (internal and external)
○ Event-driven (e.g. Apache Kafka)
○ Machine learning
○ Prometheus / Grafana
○ Serverless
○ etc.
Cost
Savings

5.
● Community innovation and experimentation
● 100% open-source
● Re-invent
● Stable stream
● Battle-tested
● Customer focus
Trade offs

6.
7.x
Stable core
Innovation
The Journey

7.
● Event-driven
● Straight-through
● Process Editor
● Process Language
● Customer RFEs
● Cloud-native
Highlights

8.
● Emitting audit events
● Event-driven interaction
● CloudEvents
Event-driven

9.
● Execute from start to finish
○ Return results
● Use case
○ Service orchestration
○ Batch processing
○ Event processing
● Lightweight
○ execution …
○ … and retry
Straight-through Processes

10.
Embeddable Process Editor

11.
Fluent API
RuleFlowProcessFactory factory = ...
factory.variable("x", … );
factory.startNode(1);
factory.workItemNode(2).workName(...);
factory.endNode(3);
factory.connection(2, 1, ...);
factory.connection(2, 1, ...);
factory.validate();
Process Language?
Serverless Workflow
● Vendor-neutral, portable specification
● YAML / JSON
● Kogito-based implementation
○ Based on same core capabilities
○ Serverless ecosystem

12.
● Continuously evolve together with our customers
○ More powerful query / search capabilities
○ Starting process instances from node(s), with results
○ Adding onSignal and onMessage to process listeners
○ Case ID customization
○ Tagging process variables
○ Immutable SpringBoot deployments
○ Administration
○ Dashbuilder
○ etc.
Customer RFEs

13.
Domain-specific services
● Dedicated
● Distributed
● Cloud technologies
+
Kogito supporting services
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F
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Cloud-native
JVM or native
Quarkus
Knowledge
(Executable Model)
Domain API

14.
Helping you build
your intelligent application !
Execution Explainable
Serverless
Cloud
Tooling
Business
Logic
Custom
Web
App

15.
● Straight-through
● Developer productivity
● VSCode
● Cloud-native
● Scalability
● Event-driven
Demo

16.
16
Questions?
@KrisVerlaenen
@KieCommunity
https://kie.zulipchat.com/