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

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

3
Housekeeping
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• The recording and slides will be
made available after the webinar
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Monitoring & Orchestrating
Your Microservices Landscape
using Workflow Automation
@berndruecker

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.

“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
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/

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

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

And you?

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…

Wild West Integration

“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

Some
Service
Some
Service
Some
Service
Some
Service
Some
Service
Some
Service
Some
Service
Autonomous Microservices…

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

Three steps…
@berndruecker

(Micro-)services
Checkout
Payment
Inventory
Shipment
@berndruecker

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

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

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

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

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

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

Phil Calcado at QCon NYC 2019

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

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

Demo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Order
Checkout
Payment
Inventory
Shipment

Demo

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

Workflows live inside service boundaries
@berndruecker

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

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

BPMN enables long running interactions

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

BPMN enables long running interactions

BPMN enables long running interactions

BPMN enables the Saga pattern

BPMN enables the Saga pattern

The payment workflow

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

Example
@berndruecker

Example
@berndruecker
sync

Example
@berndruecker

It is hard to implement
Payment
Seat
ReservationBooking
Ticket
Generation
REST

It is hard to implement
Payment
Seat
ReservationBooking
Ticket
Generation
REST

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

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

@berndruecker
Redesign your business process accordingly!

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

Thank you!
@berndruecker

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

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+

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Q&A

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