Camunda Reviews

We use the product to automate our workflows. It is used for task management.

Camunda is a good product. The product has a good task management engine. Camunda has had a good impact on our operational efficiency. The integrations are getting better. It has a lot of REST APIs. We can integrate the tool via REST. It is a good feature. It's much better than what it used to be.

Camunda is Java-based. It would be better if the tool were made less reliant on Java.

I have been using the solution for four to five years.

The solution is very stable. I rate the stability a nine out of ten.

The solution is very scalable. I rate the scalability an eight and a half out of ten. We have more than 100 users. I use the product twice a week.

We have used Flowable. We also used an IBM product, but it was not very good. We chose Camunda because it is more scalable. It has a smaller footprint. It is the most effective product.

The initial setup is easy. I rate the ease of setup a nine out of ten. The solution has multiple deployment options. It has its own cloud services. The deployment takes just a few hours.

We deploy the tool in-house. We've embedded it within our application. We need only one person for the deployment.

We use the free version.

The number of people required to maintain the tool depends on the application in which it is embedded. We might not need many people for maintenance. Our in-house team resolves all our issues, so we do not have to contact support. There is a lot of documentation available. They are very good. The solution has BPMN and DMN. DMN is very powerful when modeling business decisions. The rules engine is very good. I will recommend it for the rules engine. Overall, I rate the product a nine out of ten.

As a service company, we implement this product for different customers. It's quite useful in automating processes, particularly with its orchestration capabilities.

The visibility – the diagrams you create – and then being able to automate based on them are valuable features. It's easy to explain and comprehend, and the integration aspects are valuable.

Typically, the user integrates with the business applications by calling jobs using REST APIs and similar methods. When the user needs connectors to databases for fetching data – that's where it's useful. Also, until the previous version, the user could embed Camunda within other applications. That was a good feature.

The user interface is good from the development point of view. But it's not a no-code, low-code kind of thing. From a developer's perspective, it works well.

So, it might not be easy for non-technical people to use. Camunda themselves never positioned it as a tool primarily for business users. Business users could use it for the designing perspective and then hand it over to the developers.

In the latest version, there are certain workflow nodes that are missing. Camunda should bring those back, or rather, develop them quickly. We've seen some of this on their roadmap, so they're working on it.  

I have been familiar with this product for five years. 

Whatever issues we've faced, we were able to resolve on our own, so it's been good enough for us.

The open-source aspect was important to us. So Camunda has been a good fit.

We work with both the free version and the latest paid version, as well as version 7.4.

The pricing has been flexible. Overall, it's been good.

If a company has workflow automation requirements or needs orchestration, it's quite useful.

Overall, it's good and solid. At least up to version seven, which we're heavily using. Version eight is progressing, and Camunda will continue to add the things we need. I would rate it at least a nine out of ten.

It is usually used to orchestrate or automate flows of interaction between our systems. It is basically for integration. For example, for a permit that needs to go through several systems, in Camunda, we have a business process that orchestrates all the steps where the permit needs to be processed. All the systems are notified of this permit, and if there are people who need to interact with a specific permit, they get notified. They can then take action. That's the kind of use case for which we use Camunda in our organization.

For myself, the use case is similar, but it is for invoicing. When we receive an invoice, we need to process it. It goes through the business process. There are a lot of business rules that are applied to it. For example, we will check whether the total amount is balanced with subtotals and tax, and if that's not the case, with Camunda, we can create what's called a user task. It allows us to make an agent to take care of this invoice and fix the data that is related to it. These are the use cases that we are trying to achieve with Camunda. The goal is to clean up the invoice and make sure that the information related to it is correct so that it can be transferred to our ERP to pay suppliers.

It is on-premise, and we've been able to put it in a Docker container. It is deployed in Kubernetes in our organization.

The main benefit is automation. When you don't have such a tool, you take a business process and try to interpret it in terms of code. You don't have visibility. Camunda helps an organization to see the process. If you see that something is wrong in your process, you can easily adjust it to fix the issues. There is a tool that comes with the Enterprise version of Camunda that allows you to see where most of the tasks or processes are merging in your business process. So, you can update and optimize that. If your organization uses Camunda to automate processes, you can have enormous gains from that.

It is a great tool. It was our choice to use it. It works well as a universal process orchestrator for complex business processes. It allows us to focus on the business process itself. If you want to orchestrate multiple calls to external systems and you want to be sure that all the systems are notified, it works great. My use case was more business-oriented, and it worked great for that. As a universal orchestration tool, it is good and powerful.

It allows business users to create, update, and execute complex workflows. This is important for us. We are more project-oriented, which is also the way most organizations work. We have a lot of developers during the development, but when we reach a point where the solution is built and we are in an operational state, we prefer to have a tool that can be used by the business. They should be able to configure and personalize their solution without requiring developers to do it. They should be flexible and autonomous in doing that, and we in IT don't necessarily have to have developers for that. We can focus on other projects. There are a lot of benefits to working like that.

Its ease of use is important in allowing us to automate processes. For my personal use case, it simulates a type of virtual agent. It allows us to gain greater value because people don't have to work on basic things. Camunda is doing it instead. We are adding great value by using Camunda for small things.

It has the ability to integrate with a variety of automated and digital systems, which, for us, was a prerequisite. It was important because if it could not interact with our system, it would have been hard to automate anything. It would become just like a business process to orchestrate people instead of the system. Therefore, it was important that we have connectivity with other systems. In the version we have, there are no specific connectors. There are more generic connectors, such as HTTP connectors. This might have changed in the new version, but the ability to interact with other systems was a prerequisite for us. If it didn't have this functionality, it wouldn’t have been interesting to use Camunda.

It helps bridge communication gaps between our development and business departments. Because everything is visible, the developers could see exactly what the client is trying to accomplish. To have something that we can see or even touch was interesting. It reduced the gap between two things. Only connectors were a little bit hard to understand for the business people, but developers were there to assist in configuring the connector. They had to work together, but the main focus was on the business, and it helped the developers in understanding what the business was trying to achieve.

Camunda automation has freed up our staff's time to focus on other valued tasks. When we are developing our solution, we have sprints of two weeks. We organize our work for two weeks, and regularly, we have tasks related to the business process and how we need to update it to adjust to some reality. Now, we have people from the business who are doing it, but it is still visible to the developers. It has saved the time of at least one developer for the two weeks because the business is able to work on that alone. We have five or six developers, and now, they can focus on the technical side of the solution.

Before Camunda, we had a lot of people interacting with the invoice daily. We had, for example, an agent who was doing 300 invoice checks and validations per day. With Camunda, those people are now handling only more complex checks and validations. Our processing time for an invoice is reduced from about 30 days to 10 days. There is about 70% saving of time.

We can easily define and deploy business processes. Camunda provides the tools that allow business people to design business processes. We don't have to have developers for it. It is so easy to use that our business people can go into the tool and model their business processes. We get time to do other things than just designing business processes. They are called business processes because it is the business that's driving them. So, it is better that they can design them because they're the right people to design them. The tool is great for that.

Transition-wise also, it is good. For example, if you have a defined business process with an invoice, and then for some reason, the business people decide that they want to add the business rules in their business process, they just can take the latest version of the business process, add the business rule, and easily deploy the new process to Camunda. Magically, all the new invoices will go to the new process, and the old ones will remain until all the invoices are processed. It is very easy to transition between all those business process definitions. These are the two most interesting features that Camunda provides.

We're trying to put the people from the business to do it. We are using APIs, and we have open APIs to define our APIs and the request-response that each call requires and sends. So, to base the mapping on that, there was nothing to help. I know that with some tools, such as Oracle tools, you can see the input and expected output. With drag and drop, you can take one property from the left and drag it to the right, and it does all the mapping itself, but that's not the case with Camunda. So, for me, this is something that can be improved.

If you stick to the basics, it can be pretty easy. If you need to extend, as we did with custom plugins, this is rather hard because the documentation is not that great. Everything is there. It is an open-source tool, and we had access to classes and documentation, but there was no great explanation on how to use them. There were also not many examples. It was pretty hard to go this way, but if you stick with the basic functionality, it is a great and easy tool.

Another thing that we struggled with has already been fixed. They now offer a SaaS version of Camunda. We struggled a little bit with how to deploy Camunda in our infrastructure. The way it was designed was that the database can easily become a performance bottleneck. It is something that they could improve. They can provide more examples of how to implement a scalable solution using Camunda.

My organization has been using it for around five years. For me, it has been around two years.

We had to do a lot of tweaking. It hasn't been stable from the beginning, but with some effort, it can become stable.

It is limited. The way it works is that when you are starting, you have to create a full autonomous Camunda instance with its own database. It can work, but it is not out of the box. If you want to have minimal scalability of Camunda, you can do it, but it will be linked to a single database, which can become a bottleneck. So, if your database sizing is not great enough, when you scale Camunda, there will be a performance issue. Usually, it works great, but it depends on your business case and your intent in using Camunda.

Our experience was great. Usually, they were assessing what we did. They were asking us to provide our configuration, and they were responding fast. It is different for different organizations, but I personally always prefer that they don't do the work for us. They should provide more advice and then we learn from that. They had the same approach, and I was happy with that. We used their consultant two or three times, and each time, it was a great service. I would rate them an eight out of ten.

Positive

We started with Camunda. 

We have three instances of Camunda running, and inside Camunda, there are multiple business processes for different solutions. For example, we have different types of permits. Each one has its own business process, and everything is deployed on Kubernetes. We have about 10 or 15 endpoints that are used through connectors.

Its setup was a little hard. The documentation was not that great at that time, and they had a lot of versions. What made it hard was that their recommendation was changing. For some time, they were providing a Docker image, and then they changed to what they call a green stack where we were using spring boot to achieve that. I'm not sure what it is now, but I know that it changed again. So, it was hard to follow the best practices related to Camunda at the beginning. It came down to documentation.

Overall, it took weeks. To have something running was fast and took days, but we had a lot of tweaking to do. To be advanced in our solution development, we did stress tests and had a few problems with that. We were trying to adjust the configuration, and the documentation was not always easy to read. Sometimes, the configuration was easy because we had to adjust the configuration just with the XML file. Sometimes, we had to go a little further in Java. There were different levels of tweaking. Overall, it was fast to have the initial version of Camunda running, but it took us a lot of time to have something production ready.

We started doing it in-house because we wanted to acquire knowledge about that. After a few weeks or months, as we were getting closer to our production date, we got the Camunda Enterprise version. One of the things that came with that license was support from Camunda. So, we contacted them just to update how we did our configuration. They found that we had a lot of instance processes, and because of our level of history, it had a lot of extra data. They provided us with scripts to help clean our database from unrequired data. So, in the beginning, we didn't take any help from a consultant or Camunda, but as we were near our delivery dates, we took some help. Even when we were in production, we had some issues. We contacted Camunda for some things that were not working correctly. It was just to get advice on how we installed things. It was okay, but it required some adjustment.

In terms of the number of people involved in its deployment, because it was something that was considered complex, I did it myself just to have the basics, and after that, when there was something to adjust, the team did it with me. So, it was me, and there was a team that came after.

In terms of maintenance, the way they have made it, it is pretty low maintenance. If you want to upgrade the version of Camunda, you just have to go into the dependencies to adjust the version. Inside the version, there's always a migration script that is embedded in the version. So, it isn't self-maintenance, but you just have to change the version, and everything is done magically.

We're using the free version. We used the Enterprise version for some time. If I compare free versus what we paid at that time, the Enterprise version costs a lot. For the additional functionality that we got with the Enterprise version, it was too costly.

The feature that appealed to us in the Enterprise version was the migration plan. If you have a business process, for example, with an invoice, and you deploy a new version with a new invoice, for certain times, you will have two business processes running, but we wanted to have only one process instance running at a time. So, we have to migrate the old process instance to the new process definition. They provide the APIs for doing that, but it can be hard. If you are at the node in the old process, you need to tell the engine that you want to migrate it to another node in the new process definition. Doing that manually can be hard. If your business process doesn't change that much, it can be okay, but in the case where it changes a lot, the Camunda Enterprise version provides a user interface to help map the migration between the nodes. We have long-running processes. For example, we could have invoices that are stuck in this process for 10 or 20 days. So, to migrate, we can't wait for the invoice to be processed because it is taking too much time. So, the tool helped us to do this migration planning, and that was one of its greatest features. 

Another appealing feature was that if something happened in your process and you want to debug to see what is going on, the Enterprise version provides a user interface to easily follow the progression of your process. For each node, you can see what changed at what time. That was very helpful when we had a problem with our process. These were the two features that helped us a lot because, at some point, we had some problems using Camunda. Having the Camunda Enterprise version helped us to fix those problems and helped us migrate, but when you have something more stable, as we have right now, those features are less important. We are no longer using the Enterprise version.

In terms of TCO, because it is an open-source solution, it was limited to the time that we spent integrating it. It took us a full year to integrate it into our system. It took a lot of time, which cost us a lot. The cost is also related to the infrastructure. For example, our database is getting bigger every day, but it is not much. Overall, it didn't have a big impact on our functional budget.

At that time, it was one of the few open-source solutions available in the market. For us, it was easier to go with Camunda. We are a government organization, and we need to go through the request of proposal process to acquire a solution, but we didn't for Camunda because it was open source. 

We quickly liked how it was working. It was a no-brainer at the time. We knew that we wanted a workflow engine, and it was only Camunda that provided the level of flexibility that we were searching for and was open source. That's why we went with Camunda. We didn't find any other interesting providers. Now, I know there are a lot more solutions. So, if we have to start over with a new solution, we will take time to see if there are any other tools that can achieve the same.

The most important thing would be to do a proof of concept before going too far. Some tools are very stable and you can go with them right away, but with Camunda, just because there is so much to know, it is better to do a proof of concept before going all in.

The connectors provided by Camunda can be enough. It depends on your use case. By default, there is an HTTP connector, and there is also a SOAP connector. It is easy to use the connectors. They provide a base connector, and you can build it more. In our case, we had to go a little further and develop plugins in Java, which was a bit of an issue because it is not our main technology stack. We don't develop much in Java. So, there was a learning curve for developers, but overall, it went well.

I know that Camunda offers a user interface for people when they need to interact with it. We didn't use it in our case because we found the user interface too simple. It was not providing us with enough information. and the other thing was that if a user is working in system A and had to interact with Camunda, he had to leave his context to go to system B and do the task. So, in our case, we decided to integrate it into the same system to provide all the information that a user needs to accomplish a task. So, it is a bit limited in that aspect, but the fact is that when you use Camunda, what you're trying to achieve as a goal is to prevent people from interacting too much with the process. So, it may not be a problem if the user interface is not as rich and complex.

I would rate it an eight out of ten.

The solution is used in my company, where we deal with insurance.

In our company, we use Camunda to automate our process to reduce the need for human tasks. In short, my company uses the product to reduce the need for manual work. The tool can help automate processes like insurance claims, onboarding, and other areas that are managed manually. Various processes in our company can be converted to automated ones with the help of Camunda.

The best feature related to the product is that it offers users a zero-code or no-code platform, so people can use the product without being developers or knowing Java or other microservices.

The support offered by the product is an area of concern where improvements are required.

Though Camunda offers one of the best support services in the market, I know that Camunda Platform 8.0 is still in the development phase. The tool can have more guidelines and best practices that can be made available over the internet to help people who are researching the solution as it is a new product in the market.

I have been using Camunda for a year. My company currently uses Camunda Platform 8.0. I am just a user of the product.

It is an absolutely stable solution.

It is a scalable solution.

Camunda is a new product in our company, but once we show the abilities of the tool and showcase it by going live with the solution, our company's entire client base will open up.

There are no admins required to take care of Camunda.

My company plans to use more of the product in the future.

Camunda is the first tool that we have used in our company. I believe that Infosys was using IBM, but they also moved to Camunda recently.

The product's initial setup phase was neither an easy nor a difficult process, though my company did receive support from Camunda, considering that I work in a big company with firewall products in place. There were some hurdles during the setup phase, making it a not-so-smooth process, but my company was able to deploy the product successfully in the environment.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises and on the cloud model.

Compared to some of the major players in the market, like IBM, Camunda is a cheaply priced product, making it one of its major USPs.

My company chose Camunda since it has two parts, one of which is Camunda Rule Engine, while the other one is Camunda BPMN. When it comes to Camunda Rule Engine, Camunda passes a set of rules through the tool itself, a process that doesn't happen in the system but happens externally through validation checks called the Camunda DMN Decision Engine. After a certain period, my company realized that Camunda's main feature lies in what Camunda BPMN provides to its users. After getting a demo of Camunda, my company was impressed with the solution, and we decided to try it.

Camunda's website is filled with a lot of knowledgeable stuff, so it is important to get in touch with a person from Camunda. By just going through the website Camunda, it is possible to strengthen your understanding of the fundamentals of the product. Camunda also provides free courses to those who want to learn more about the product.

I rate the overall tool a seven and a half out of ten.

We used the solution in quite a simple manner. We were disappointed that the dictionary was missing. The hierarchy could not be shown, defined, or structured the way we like. We did not use all the features. I have used BPMN Modeler.

Camunda is really useful. That is why my colleagues and I use it in the company. The solution is useful for small projects.

The product does not have a dictionary. The tool must enable users to build or design sub-processes. It must provide a more convenient and easy way to define sub-processes.

I have been using the solution for five years.

The tool is always stable. We have no troubles. I rate the stability an eight to nine out of ten.

I rate the tool’s scalability a five out of ten. We have ten users. The product is used once or twice a week.

I rate the ease of setup seven to eight out of ten.

We use a community version.

All the business process management tools are quite similar. We have to get used to each application's individual ideas, thoughts, and intentions. We use BIC for our organization and Camunda for the projects. It is easier to use Camunda for small projects. Signavio is also a competitor.

It's not possible for us to define a process as deep as it is necessary to automate it. We tested but did not use DMN capabilities. I will recommend the solution to others. I just finished studying business process management. Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.

My company uses Camunda Platform as a business process optimization or business process engineering tool.

The most valuable feature of the solution is that it is flexible. I want to see if the tool is good enough for my company to continue with its use or if there are some limitations. If, at our company, we are sure that it would take us to complete your business processes engineering exercise up to the level of enterprise architecture, then we would really be able to appreciate the tool. I am unsure of the product's capabilities because I am unfamiliar. I want to get someone experienced enough to suggest to me which is the best choice for a BPM tool.

Collaborations and process documentation in Camunda Platform are areas with shortcomings that need improvement. It would be appreciated if we were more flexible in managing the processes.

I am unsure if we can get a beta version of the tool with many features, including data modeling, apart from process modeling. If we get something that can be achieved with data modeling and collaboration features for any tasks, including the ones from outside, it would be much more appreciated.

We want a common platform for taking care of customs and domestic taxes since that could be a good thing for our business process across our entire company.

I have been using Camunda Platform for about three months. I am a user of the product.

It has been a stable solution so far since it meets our needs, including data modeling, which we need to do before we embark on analyzing and optimizing the business processes.

My company has 6,000 employees, out of which around 100 people use the product.

I contacted the solution's technical support since I wanted them to give me some facts regarding the points raised by a person from GBTEC, a German company, who claims that Camunda Platform can't fulfill some expectations since its imitations in terms of capabilities, especially collaboration features. I dropped an email to Camunda Platform so that someone from the support can let me know about the product's data modeling and whether it can go up to the enterprise architecture level or if something is missing in it, because of which we might have to get a beta or higher version.

The initial setup was very easy and flexible.

The solution is deployed on-premises.

Camunda Platform is an open-source product.

We, the employees, had suggested the company authorities opt for Camunda Platform. I was looking into certain facts from Camunda's support team so that I can suggest a good way to help my company design business processes. Our company has to look after customs and domestic taxes, and BPMN in Camunda Platform has been done using the custom function.

We intend to do a few things with the product, and I am unsure if it would raise or drop the product's rating in the future.

So far, considering the modeling purposes for which we used the tool in the last month, I rate the overall solution a nine out of ten.

We only use the engine, and we have implemented our solution around Camunda Cloud.

We have a lot of use cases. In the past, the major use case was related to infrastructure ordering. If users wanted to onboard their applications to the cloud, the whole process was run by us. They would go to the ITSM tool that we have, and from there, the whole process of onboarding the application was run by us. For example, if you required certain access, all these accesses were provided by us. So, mainly, it was related to the infrastructure processes where you order something and have to talk to AD, Exchange, or other kinds of infrastructure products and systems you have in the company.

When I compare the old legacy platform to the current one, the number of incidents has reduced massively. Our platform is much more stable. We don't have the issue of any bottlenecks. In almost a year since we migrated all the workflows, there have been a limited number of incidents with regard to the platform.

It has definitely saved time. Due to the fact that we have fewer incidents, people were able to concentrate on platform improvements and automation of the platform itself. We are trying to automate as much as possible from our side. We could focus on improving Dev backups or CI/CD. We also improved a lot also with regard to implementing or POC'ing new features. We have much more time now to focus on new solutions that we can offer to our customer base.

Our team is called Oasis, which is a short form for Orchestration and System Integration Service. It's sort of our core that we want to integrate all the systems and orchestrate on the system. That's one of our key selling points. We have a team that has knowledge of most of the systems and how to integrate them. Camunda enables us to integrate, but the actual work is done by our team. All the brain power comes from the team.

We were able to cover all the use cases we had in the past. We were able to integrate with legacy systems, and we are also working on cloud-based solutions, such as Azure Functions, and other cloud services. I usually say to my customers that if their application or end system provides a proper interface such as REST, we will be able to integrate with their system. So far, we have been able to integrate with all the systems. We always try to find a solution, and so far, we have been successful in that part. With regards to RPA bots, we have not yet tried out the use case. It's yet to be proven from our side. We are currently testing out the decision engine and trying to promote that in the business areas. Depending on the success or basically on how people are adapting to that, we might also extend that, and it would probably be a new use case.

It can cover everything through code. That's really beneficial. In the past, you had to do certain configurations and things that usually were hidden in configuration, sub-configuration, and so on. So, only the ones who implemented the process would understand it, but now, due to the fact that everything is as code, everyone is able to read what's going on in the process. It's easy to see how the process is configured. It's more transparent for us to see how to change things, and it's easier to transfer tasks from one person to another. In the past, you had to deal with the subject matter expert on a specific process and the handover took much longer. Nowadays, it's much more fluid to understand the process and its implementation.

One reason we selected Camunda or Cloud/DB is that it comes with the support of the BPM notation, which helps to define processes in a standard manner. Another reason was that Camunda Cloud, as the name says, is designed for a new cloud era. That's why we went for that part. We were very early adopters of this solution. We introduced it even before version one was out. We hope that going forward, on the scalability side, we have the potential to scale the platform for future demand.

It's lightweight. It comes with a lot of flexibility, which, on the other hand, means that you have to have certain knowledge to handle features. You have the potential to change things, and it's easy to introduce new functionalities or new features to the platform. 

It's open source, which was another key factor for choosing Camunda. Its being open source helps us to understand the platform better and also integrate better with the platform.

They should focus more on enterprise challenges. We are using the enterprise license, and I would like to see more interactions with Camunda. The enterprise license should cover enterprise challenges. We would need more touchpoints so that Camunda understands better what's going on at the enterprise level. That's an area where Camunda could improve. They can understand the challenges of an enterprise and try to come up with solutions from their side for the enterprise.

As an enterprise license owner, if we have some ideas for features, we expect them to release the features faster than now. So, a bit faster feature release is an area for improvement.

There should be a multi-tenant solution for the platform where it supports multiple organizations on one platform instead of having to spin up multiple clusters for each organization. There should be an easy way to integrate different departments into one platform without having to operate multiple platforms. The operations should be easier with the enterprise solution. It should not create more overhead for the operations people.

Another improvement area is the licensing model. We are yet to find out a smart licensing model for Camunda. We are mainly using the CP engine, and we require only a support and service contract, but this is not yet possible. Their licenses were probably made 10 or 20 years ago, but we need tailor-made licenses for the implemented use case. As a platform owner, I have to provide our customers with a static price tag. The price should not increase exponentially, and we should be able to tell them that we are not overcharging them. If the cost gets too high, it's likely to not be used in the future.

We started the evaluation in 2019, and in 2020, we got everything approved. 

From '21 to '22, everything has been quite stable after all the workload migrated to the new platform. Nowadays, it's stable. There are some hiccups, but they are more related to introducing the new changes. Usually, we are able to deal with them in a meaningful timeframe so that they don't affect the customer base too much.

So far, we didn't face an issue with scalability. We started before version 1, and we are currently on the verge of moving to version 8. I would have more input after we have fully migrated to version 8.

I have interacted with them many times. Usually, the response is quite fast. I would rate them a 7 out of 10.

Neutral

We were using a different solution previously.

I was here during its initial setup. It took quite some time because it also had to adhere to our architecture. We had to do some modifications to achieve this. It was quite intensive at the beginning. At the time, Camunda also provided Helm charts and other things, but in the end, we had to adjust too many things. So, we basically prepared our own automation in order to deploy the platform. It took us some time to make that automation ready. We wanted to have an easy way to apply the platform, and that took us some time. It was like an arrow that was dragged back, but in the end, it made us faster for new changes.

In terms of the deployment model, we provide it only as an internal service to Swiss Re itself. Currently, it's a hybrid setup. Parts of the solution are in the public cloud and parts of it are in the private cloud. It's deployed at multiple locations where the orchestration part is in the public cloud and the majority of the workers are in a private cloud. We have this sort of distribution of the platform.

In terms of the implementation strategy, we started the evaluation in 2019. We had multiple products. We did the proper requirements engineering and decided to go with Camunda. Before going to production, we organized Hacktoberfest where we invited our existing customers who were on the legacy platform. We let them try it out to see how it is for them. We got quite positive feedback from them, and based on that, we started the process of onboarding it.

Within Swiss Re, there's a standard process called the digital governance framework. We have to go through this extensive process where licenses are reviewed with regard to security, architecture, exposure to the network, etc. All these things are reviewed in this process. Within that process, we also have to do penetration testing to see if the system is viable for our use case and if it's secure. It was 2020 when we got everything approved. From there, we started with the migration. Along with the migration and complete evaluation, we onboarded new people to the team who had different skill sets required in order to run the platform in the future. So, we built up a new team in Budapest and also upscaled our existing team.

In the first phase, we mainly targeted people with a certain knowledge of IT and engineering. For them, it was easy to implement the workflows and so on. In the next or current phase, we are trying to introduce the platform to business users. In order to do that, we have to further improve the UI so that it's also easy for a business user to create a business process in the future. We are not there yet. It's an iterative process where we sit together with business process owners and try to find out their demands and adapt according to the demands. We are trying to avoid big-bang approaches and proceed in an iterative way, and with Camunda, we have the capability to iteratively improve ourselves.

For developers with a development or software engineering background, it's quite easy to implement Camunda. For those who do not have that knowledge, my team provides a service. We go to the teams and help them with the implementation of the workers and the workflows. So, we support it on an end-to-end basis. We get the requirements, document them, test them, and develop them. We cover all these things as an end-to-end service, but the goal for us is to move more and more toward a self-service platform. Until then, we will operate in a hybrid mode. So, currently, there are people who can do it themselves and deploy workflows, and there are people who require help from our side. Until we close the gap with self-service, we will support the people or designers. For business users, it's very important that it becomes very easy to use. Having an easy UI where they can drag and drop in their workflow and test it in a non-intrusive way is quite important going forward. It would be a success factor in the end. If we want to succeed in the business areas, we have to provide an easy platform that can be utilized by any person with limited knowledge of software engineering.

It hasn't had any effect on the cost of design, but the overall cost of operations and management is reduced. It has made our life a bit easier in terms of the reduction of incidents and the maintenance of the platform.

We are using the paid edition because there is no separate support and service license yet. We are yet to find a suitable licensing model for Camunda because we only use the engine, and we have implemented our solution around Camunda Cloud. So, we are mainly interested in the support and service, and that's what we mainly use in the paid edition.

It was a fairly new solution at the time, and we wanted to support the open-source community with that. So, we wanted to ensure that this product has some sort of backing so that it can continue.

To someone who has the free edition of Camunda and is considering upgrading to the paid license, I would say that it depends on the use case and the criticality of their system. In our case, if we have production issues, we want to post them quite fast and we want to have quite fast feedback cycles. One of the reasons why we have taken the license is to ensure that we have a proper response in a meaningful timeframe. If that's not a requirement, probably the open-source license makes sense. It also depends on the appetite for having new features on the platform.

We evaluated multiple options. We evaluated classical BPM solutions such as Activiti, Bonitasoft, and the Camunda BPM platform. We also looked at jBPM. On the non-BPM side, at the time, we looked at Uber Cadence and Netflix Conductor.

It's important to have the customers on board and work closely with them. That's because if they don't get what you are doing, you will not have customers. It's very important to work closely with the customers to be successful. It's important to make sure that customers understand what the platform does and how it's achieving. The training part and creating awareness are important. You need to create awareness about automation and what it can provide to customers.

Most of the time, people are too busy to do any automation, even though it will help them in the long run. What I learned is that you can't delegate it to a team. You have to be hands-on with the team and help them to make the automation. That is important.

From the Camunda perspective, you can start with the open-source version, and then at a later stage, evaluate if you require the enterprise features for your use case.

When it comes to connectors, we sometimes use the implementation provided by the community, but so far, we have not used the standard connectors provided with Camunda because, in Swiss Re, there are a lot of custom implementations, and sometimes, the connectors don't work straight away. So, we usually implement our own workers.

I would rate it an 8 out of 10. Once it has the improvements we need, I can give it a 10.

We have an event-based architecture and Camunda works as an orchestrator for our microservices.

Over the last three years or so, we have been using Kafka a lot. We wanted to bring in an orchestration engine to integrate seamlessly with our nesting system. We had a lot of existing applications that are not that old, and we did not want to rewrite software components that we own to get the benefits of orchestration. That was where there was a need. One of the factors that will decide if we will use it for more use cases at our company or not, is the ease of integration.

As an organization, we don't want to reinvent the wheel, so it's important to us that the connectors are available out-of-the-box and reusable. We don't want our developers to write boilerplate code. Having the connectors ensures that we have standardization in the way that we are integrating with other parts of our ecosystem. It also allows us to put some best practices into those standards. For example, we can implement three tries for a connector. That helps us be declarative. It provides a good tradeoff between low code and no code.

It has a ubiquitous language across stakeholders. When we are talking to stakeholders about how a process evolves over time, or about the complexity of a process, it's a lot easier to explain without having to go through Confluence pages or through a lot of sessions with product people explaining to them how a particular system works. They have a good amount of understanding by looking at the process diagram. That really helps me, personally, in communicating with them.

We have also been able to build out dashboards for our asynchronous processes. Those dashboards have been really helpful. Otherwise, we would have to rely on the data analytics team to provide us with any analytics data around the events that are flowing in our system. Now, for some of our purposes, we can build dashboards ourselves using Camunda.

In addition, we have built dashboards that show important statistics about our business process and key changes that happen in our process definition. Those changes communicate a business value to our business stakeholders. For example, in the last seven days, how much traffic have we ingested into our system, and where has most of it gone? That kind of information is now more of a self-service for everyone. The dashboards we have built are giving us a good amount of information about what's happening in our systems. We are also using the BPMN designs for our design discussions with the product team.

We have been more agile because we don't now have to keep the Confluence documentation up to date. When you put something in Confluence, it's hard to keep it updated and make sure that it's up to date with the latest implementation. Now, the business process flows are code. They are modeled as BPMN files, so we don't have to make extra effort to maintain the business process. And while we are discussing our product, we can communicate how the small things that are part of a process could build up and what role they are playing in the overall process. It also helps us find out, if some part of our process were to fail, what impact it would have on the overall process execution. That's something that teams have recently started discussing more.

Since day one, our goal was to build reusable components that can be used in other projects. We recently did a discovery for one of our projects and we found that we could reuse 80 percent of what we had developed on the Camunda platform. The microservices and the connectors were reusable and that really reduced the development effort drastically for that use case.

We are now spending more time looking at the bigger picture, and not just looking at a particular microservice. The developers can now see where their microservice fits into the flow and how their microservice responds, whether in a successful manner or in failure.

The integration with almost any language, product, and even human tasks, is valuable. It's very seamless to integrate into existing systems. It doesn't require you to rewrite a lot of your existing system. That's where it really stands out.

We have used a couple of connectors, including the Kafka connector a lot because we have mostly a Kafka-based architecture. The connectors are really seamless. They just fit in. They don't require you to make a lot of changes to your existing infrastructure. That's what connectors are primarily meant for, to enable enterprise-level integrations. We also build out custom connectors for our use cases.

In addition to Kafka, we can easily integrate it using any microservice or legacy microservice. All you need to do is include their library and put in a couple of annotations on your existing methods, and they can act as Camunda workers. You can transform your existing code into Zeebe components and that requires very minimal coding. We are also working on building more connectors, and that will smooth out further adoption of this technology within our ecosystem. We can orchestrate almost any remote system if it's accessible over the network and it implements any protocol. If it's reachable, we should be able to orchestrate it via the Camunda platform.

In terms of its ease of use for engineers, it's pretty easy. We have an engineer who joined us two weeks back and he has been onboarded. He's able to make changes in the BPMN. That's very important for modifying business processes.

We have been using Camunda Platform for a little less than one year.

We anticipated the load for one year, at least, and we have done load tests. The system is pretty reliable. We have not had even a single issue in production using their product. It's very reliable.

It is very scalable. It's built on a similar architecture to Kafka, which we know is a very scalable platform. The scalability has been one of the most important features that they have designed their product with. They had scalability in mind from the start. 

We have tested it for thousands of process instances per second. There are some blogs from Camunda that show it even goes to millions of process instances per second.

While it's very scalable, it would be great if auto-scaling capabilities were added to it. We haven't seen any issues in production related to scalability, but one area that really could help out would be to have dynamic resizing of the cluster. Right now, you have to do capacity planning. You plan for the capacity that you need in the next couple of years and then size your cluster accordingly.

Having said that, I haven't seen problems with the product so far.

I would rate their technical support a nine out of 10. The one thing that I feel there could be more of is their exposure to AWS. I'm not saying that they don't know about AWS, but I think a lot of their customers are using Google Cloud. I think they, themselves, deployed it on Google Cloud. But AWS is the market leader and there are a lot of customers on AWS.

Positive

We have used AWS Step Functions.

They provided help charts, so it was pretty straightforward. But when you want to tune it or run it on an enterprise level, you will want to try out a few of the parameters they have provided, and play around with them, to ensure that the software components that your cloud provider has can be used smoothly for deploying Camunda. Initially, you might have to make some effort to set things up on your own cluster, but they have good documentation and help charts for deployment on your Kubernetes.

We have different environments, including development, testing, staging, and production. We could even implement a CI process for our workflow instances and BPMN files, as they can be deployed using a CI/CD pipeline. Microservices can be deployed at their own pace in a CI/CD pipeline. That was the strategy for deployment.

We did it in-house, but we did use some consulting from Camunda during some of our initial days. One of their solution architects was really good in terms of technical knowledge. He knows the product really well and he guided us through some of the parameters and tuning of our clusters while we were deploying.

In addition to me, we had one more person doing the deployment. One of our senior people took care of the deployment on our side. I was overseeing things but he did most of the work.

So far, we have been very pleased with what we have achieved with Camunda. We are still within our initial one-year contract but we have seen value from it.

In the use case where we were able to reduce 80 percent of the development effort with reusable code, that equated to man-hours that are directly related to cost. If you reuse code for more use cases, the cost can be justified.

We have an on-premises, self-managed installation because of some internal decisions. There is a bit of scope for improvement in how the licensing and pricing are done. They are based on the number of processing instances you execute on the cluster. They have two modes of deployment, one is their cloud version and the other one is the self-hosted mode. For the cloud version, it definitely makes sense to have it based on the number of processing instances you run, but on the self-hosted mode, the pricing model should be customized. If it were customized a bit more, it would be better for us.

We purchased their workflow engine, Zeebe, and consulting. We also operate the tool with which you can monitor your process instances. There are a couple of more tools available in their product suite, but these three aspects were most compelling for us. If we are running mission-critical workloads, we definitely need support if things go wrong on a given day. We need their expertise, so the consulting is very important for us. The workflow engine itself is also very important, as that is why we evaluated Camunda in the first place.

If data privacy is not an issue, then definitely go for the cloud version of Camunda because then you don't have to worry about managing the cluster and capacity on your own. It's more seamless than having to manage your own cluster. But if you're considering upgrading from the free version, the consulting is definitely important. They also do BPMN consulting as part of the contract. You can ask for BPMN reviews and you can ask for sessions with their solution architects. They also have a 24/7 hotline that you can call in case there are any issues.

They have an excellent open-source community. I have not seen many other forums that have developers who are as active as Camunda's developers are on their forums. The technical advice that we get from Camunda is really helpful. They know best about the product they have built over the last few years. You definitely need to have expertise on a product that you're thinking of using. The people who have built it provide a great additional value.

We did take a look at some of the options available in the market, solutions that allow you to do process automation, including Cadence/Temporal.

We selected Camunda due to a few important reasons. It's a product that solves a problem that many organizations don't even realize exists in their architecture: visibility. It gives us visibility into the complex processes that are often implemented in software or if some of the tasks are done by humans. Camunda, with its integrations and great tools for reporting, like Optimize, allows us to see where the bottlenecks are in our processes.

It also has companion tools, like Operate, that allow you to visualize the flow of a particular business process. And you can find some really cool statistics about how much of a process is actually done or where it is blocked. Those are some of the really important features that any workflow orchestration or engine should have, and Camunda supports them pretty well.

Take a look at their co-founder and CTO, Bernd Ruecker's, blog. He has a lot of good write-ups about the platform where he explains the technical architecture. He talks about how to do performance benchmarking.

Another good piece of advice is to leverage the Camunda community and forum. Their team is very active on the public forum and they respond to your questions within a day, most of the time. They give very to-the-point answers. That is a really helpful resource. They also have a good set of tutorials on BPMN in what they call the Camunda Academy. It's worth taking a look at that when you are adopting the Zeebe workflow engine, which is their primary workflow engine.

One of the important things that we want to deliver is enabling business, developers, and operations. It's important that our non-technical stakeholders don't have to get into the nitty-gritty details of technical implementations. They can have a bird's-eye view of what's happening in a process, and they can suggest or even extend a process by themselves and then hand it over to us as a requirements document. That's the direction we really want to take. So far, the product team has been very enthusiastic about it. They like it. Camunda uses a language for modeling called BPMN and it doesn't require you to be a coder or an engineer. It's a simple drag-and-drop tool. It's really cool and it helps our stakeholders to be involved in working with workflows.

There is a bit of a learning curve with BPMN. It's an industry standard, not something proprietary to Camunda, but Camunda hosts an online academy where they have tutorials about it. They have videos and free courses on how to use BPMN. That helps out in the onboarding of users.

We have been using it for a little less than a year, so our entire organization is not using it. We are really into building our experience with Camunda by applying it to a few use cases. As we see more use cases in other parts of the organization, what we have built over this past year as templates—as reusable software—can be leveraged so that they don't have to set up everything from scratch on their own.