Flowable Business Processing from Kafka Events

Flowable Business Processing
from Kafka Events
Joram Barrez (@jbarrez)
Tijs Rademakers (@tijsrademakers)
07-11-2019@jbarrez @tijsrademakers

© 2019 Flowable AG. All rights reserved.
• Principle Software
Architect at Flowable
• Flowable core dev
• Ex-Co-founder of Activiti
• Ex jBPM developer
• VP of Engineering
at Flowable
• Flowable project lead
• Ex Activiti project lead
• Author of Manning Activiti in
Action and Open Source ESBs
in Action
Short introduction
7 November 2019@jbarrez @tijsrademakers
Joram Barrez Tijs Rademakers
2

Agenda & Goals
• Explaining all that Flowable can do in 45 mins is
… impossible
• A taste of what is possible … and focus on our
recent efforts:
• Case management engine (CMMN)
• Recent improved support for using Flowable in
event-driven architectures
• And hope to inspire you to look deeper!
7 November 2019@jbarrez @tijsrademakers 3

process instances
per second
1Benchmark details: https://blog.flowable.org
Speed, scalability and innovation
• Fastest engines available1
• Lightweight
Flowable Open Source Project
4
Native BPMN, CMMN and DMN engines
• High performance, high scale
• Years of real world use
Long heritage of Open Source BPM
• Origins since 2010 in Activiti and jBPM
• Established 2016 by Alfresco co-founder and
Activiti team
Community is key
• Credibility through engagement &
contributions
• Usage all over the world
and in all kind
of industries
jBPM
Flowable
Activiti2010
2016
7 November 2019@jbarrez @tijsrademakers

OMG (Object Management Group) standards
o BPMN (Business Process Model & Notation) 2.0 - 2011
o CMMN (Case Management Model & Notation) 1.1 - 2016
o DMN (Decision Model & Notation) 1.2 - 2019
Focused on visual representation
XML definition for engine execution
Flowable supports modeling and execution of BPMN, CMMN and
DMN
Open standards

BPMNCMMN
DMN
6
Open
Standards

Model vs. Coding
• The hardest part about our job is translating requirements
• A picture says more than thousands words
• A visual model is the common meeting ground

Modeling centric
• Visual representation of
business requirements
• Understood by analysts
and devs
• Orchestration logic not
hidden in code

Runtime state
• Visual representation of
runtime state
• Current activities
• Completed activities
• State data (variables,
identity links, event
subscriptions) always
available

REST API
BPMN
Engine
CMMN
Engine
DMN Engine Form Engine
Content
Engine
10
Persistence Service
Job Service
Variable Service
Task Service
Identity ServiceEngine specific services
Confidential
Flowable
Modeler
Flowable Task
Flowable Open Source Architecture
Flowable Admin Flowable IDM

Rich REST API
• REST API for all
engines (BPMN,
CMMN, DMN etc)
• On par with Java API
• Easy to built UIs against
the REST API

Flowable Spring
Boot support
• Lots of starter modules
• Auto deployment of
process, case, decision
resources
• Creation and injection of
all engines and services
<dependency>
<groupId>org.flowable</groupId>
<artifactId>flowable-spring-boot-starter</artifactId>
<version>6.4.2</version>
</dependency>

BPMN in a Nutshell

CMMN in a Nutshell
Human task
Plan model
Stage
User event listener Exit sentry
Entry sentry
Process task

Event-Driven Architectures
• In the Flowable community, we have seen
• People experimenting with event-driven/event-sourcing architectures
(or more often architectures enriched with events)
• Demand for out-of-the-box

Event-Driven Architectures
• A process/case fits naturally
• Can be the ‘Command’ of an event
(e.g. the C in CQRS)
• Have state to react properly on the change expressed in the event
(state is often the hard part of event-sourcing)

Quick Demo

Implementation – The event registry
Flowable
Engine
EventRegistry
EventBus
EventDefinitionEventDefinitionEventDefinition
Consumers
Central repository of event metadata
Dispatches events to consumers
(default process/case behaviors are also a consumer)
Description of event structure:
- Payload
- Correlation

Implementation – Channels and Pipelines
Flowable
Engine
EventRegistry
EventBus
Channel Adapter
Event Consumer
Inbound Channel
Inbound Pipeline
Deserialization
Event key detection
* All shown here on the slide are pluggable
Payload extraction
Event transformatio
n

Implementation – Channels and Pipelines
Flowable
Engine
EventRegistry
EventBus
Channel Adapter
Event Producer
Outbound Chann
el
Outbound Pipelin
e
Serialization
Event transformatio
n

Demo
https://github.com/flowable/flowable-examples/tree/master/devoxx2019

• Fictional electrical kick-scooter
startup
• Customer satisfaction is
priority #1
Use Case

• Customer can provide a review
• Review  Kafka
• A customer case
• Groups all reviews
• Kicks of a sentiment analysis process
• Analysis is done using a process that
calls out to AWS Comprehend
• Bad review  A task for an employee is
created to try to fix the relationship
Use Case

Architecture
* (5th service (Spring Cloud API gateway) not shown to simplify things)
UI for customers
Review Service
Customer
Relationship
Service
Flowable Task
Sentiment Analysis
service
UI for employees
AWS Comprehend
Review Event
Review Event Analysis
Result
Analysis
Result
Analysis
Request
Analysis
Request

Demo: The models explained

Demo
• Simulating reviews
• Stepping through a bad user review

Demo: Review Service
• Simple Spring Webflux REST API
• Reactive pushing of events from UI into Kafka

Demo: Customer Case Service
• Spring Boot application
• Flowable Spring Boot starters
• Autodeploy cases and process models
• Register event channels and definitions
• Postgres DB

• The sentiment process uses a triggerable service task
• Send-and-wait-for-response pattern
• Race condition problem

• The sentiment process uses a triggerable service task
• During execution (tx1)
• Create event subscription
• Create async job data (to send event)
• Post-commit (tx2)
• Trigger job executor (or other node)
• Send event asynchronously
• Go into wait state
• Event receival (tx3)
• Trigger for continuation

• Can this also be made reactive?
• Yes!
• Nicely scaling of message stream handling depending on load
• (insertion of async Flowable job at event receival using R2DBC)

Demo: The Sentiment Analysis Service
• Spring Boot application
• Flowable Spring Boot starters
• Autodeploy process model
• Uses AWS SDK to call out to AWS Comprehend

• This service is effectively a function
• Can be run serverless
• Only boot up when an event is received
• Only pay for effective usage
• With all the benefits of using Flowable
• Visual models, audit/history, etc.

• This service is effectively a function
• Can e.g. be run as a serverless lambda on AWS, see
https://blog.flowable.org/2019/01/29/flowable-engine-as-a-
serverless-function/
• Flowable + Spring Cloud AWS
• Flowable + Spring Fu + GraalVM
• Flowable + Micronaut + GraalVM (13 ms bootup)

Demo: Flowable Task
• Bad review  employee form

Conclusions
• Flowable is a light-weight yet versatile open-source framework for
managing and executing processes/cases/business rules
• We’ve shown that using Flowable in event-driven architectures is
easy and powerful
• Today we’ve focused primarily on the event side of things, but
there’s plenty of more to discover!
• http://www.flowable.org

Thank you.
https://flowable.com/flowfest2019/

Flowable Business Processing from Kafka Events

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Editor's Notes