Slides from my talk at JAX London. Abstract: There is a lot of buzz around reactive architectures. Take, for example, event-driven architectures, event-streaming or reactive programming. I believe that these architectures will dominate in the future as we build more complex systems, connect more distributed components and slice systems into smaller autonomous pieces. Unfortunately, I see many companies that don’t update their customer experience or business processes to reflect this new world. In this talk, I’ll give an example and discuss the consequences, hopefully motivating you to advocate for a redesign of your business processes internally – because too much attention gravitates towards the technical side of reactive, without thinking about the user journey or business implications.

1. Leverage the Full Potential of
Your Hipster Architecture!
Rethink Business Processes and User Experience
Bernd Ruecker
mail@bernd-ruecker.de | @berndruecker

2. What‘s hipster?
Event-Driven
Reactive
Distributed Systems
Microservices
Agile
Streaming
Domain Driven Design
(DDD)
Cloud-Native
Eventual Consistency
JSON & YAML
Kubernetes
Serverless

3. What‘s not hipster?
Batch
Websphere
Monolithic Systems
Waterfall
Two-Phase Commit
Mainframe & Cobol
Serice oiented
architecture
SOAP & XML

4. But can you leverage
the full potential?

5. Example
@berndruecker

6. Example
Payment
Seat
ReservationBooking
Ticket
Generation

7. Architecture
Payment
Seat
ReservationBooking
Ticket
Generation
Kafka
AMQP
REST

8. Example
@berndruecker
sync

9. That is hard to implement
Payment
Seat
ReservationBooking
Ticket
Generation
Kafka
AMQP
REST
REST

10. Workflow automation can help
Payment
Seat
ReservationBooking
Ticket
Generation
REST

11. Workflow automation can help
Payment
Seat
ReservationBooking
Ticket
Generation
REST
Workflow Automation:
Is stateful
Can wait
Can retry
Can escalate
Can compensate

12. Live hacking

13. https://github.com/berndruecker/ticket-booking-camunda-cloud

14. Camunda
• Source-Available & Developer Friendly
• Supports BPMN
• Mature tooling, widely adopted
• On-prem or cloud
• http://camunda.com/

15. 16
Workflow engines orchestrate

16. 17
Workflow engines orchestrate anything
Straight through processing
Human Task Management
Microservices RPA bots
Functions,
Code, …
Decisions
(e.g. DMN Tables)

17. 18
The challenge are long running tasks = waiting

18. 19
A workflow engine persists state
23
79
51

19. 20
Many use cases (real-life examples)
Industry Pilot Lighthouse Broadscale Sample Clients
Cross-Industry
Approvals
Employee Onboarding
Credit Check
Microservices Orchestration
Centralized Workflow Platform
High Throughput
E2E Process Automation
Legacy BPM Replacement
Cloud Native Applications
IT Service Orchestration
Banking & Finance Asset Management
Customer Onboarding
Loan Origination & Decisioning
ATM Provisioning
Enterprise Platform Development
Trading
Risk Management / Fraud Detection
Insurance Audit
Customer Onboarding
Claim Service & Settlement
Policy Underwriting & Contracts
Integrated KYC
Core System Automation
Risk Management / Fraud Detection
Telecommunication Online Systems Integration
New Product Delivery
Cell Tower Provisioning
Order Management
Contracting, Upgrading, Termination
OSS & BSS
Open Network Automation Platform
(ONAP)
Media & Entertainment
Website Content Delivery
System Process Fallout
Subscription Management
Licensing
Content Distribution
Digital Supply Chain
New Product Development
Fraud Management
Manufacturing &
High Tech
Application prototype
Order Execution
Payments Servicing
Research & Development
Embedded Workflow Automation
Customer Service
Supply Chain

20. Warning:
Contains Opinion
@berndruecker

21. mail@berndruecker.io
@berndruecker
http://berndruecker.io/
Bernd Ruecker
Co-founder and
Chief Technologist of
Camunda

22. But…

23. Weaknesses
Payment
Seat
ReservationBooking
Ticket
Generation
REST

24. Weaknesses: Latency creep
Payment
Seat
ReservationBooking
Ticket
Generation
REST
300 ms
1150 + x ms
600 ms
250 ms

25. https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/why-performance-
mattersvhttps://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/why-performance-matters
• Pinterest increased traffic and sign-
ups by 15% when they reduced
perceived wait times by 40%.
• COOK increased conversions by 7%,
decreased bounce rates by 7%, and
increased pages per session by 10%
when they reduced average page
load time by 850 milliseconds.
• The BBC found they lost an
additional 10% of users for every
additional second their site took to
load.
• DoubleClick found 53% of mobile
site visits were abandoned if a page
took longer than 3 seconds to load.

26. Want to go serverless?
Payment
Seat
ReservationBooking
Ticket
Generation
REST
300 ms
1150 + x ms
600 ms
250 ms

27. Weaknesses: Availabiliy erosion
Payment
Seat
ReservationBooking
Ticket
Generation
REST
99 % uptime
99 % uptime
99 % uptime
96 % uptime

28. And…

29. @berndruecker

30. Takes a while

31. Takes a while

32. Takes a while

33. Takes a while

35. HTTP
500
HTTP
200

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

38. THIS!

42. HTTP
202
HTTP
200

44. Patterns
Fire & Forget Polling
Callback
Blocking Call

45. Patterns
Fire & Forget Polling
Callback
Blocking Call
HTTP 202
tricky
HTTP 202
HTTP 202
HTTP 200

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

47. @berndruecker
Redesign your business process accordingly!

48. Asynchronous communication
enables long running services which
allow to assign responsibility correctly
@berndruecker

49. Example
Order Payment
Credit
Card
Retrieve
Payment
@berndruecker

50. Example
Order Payment
Credit
Card
Retrieve
Payment
Rejected
@berndruecker

51. Example
Order Payment
If the credit
card was
rejected, the
customer can
provide new
details
Credit
Card
Retrieve
Payment
Rejected
Rejected
@berndruecker

53. Payment
failed
Who is responsible?
Order Payment
If the credit
card was
rejected, the
customer can
provide new
details
Credit
Card
Retrieve
Payment
Rejected
Payment
received
@berndruecker

54. Payment
failed
Long running services
Order Payment
Credit
Card
Retrieve
Payment
Rejected
Payment
received
@berndruecker

55. Long running services
Order Payment
Credit
Card
@berndruecker

56. Long running services allow
to assign responsibility correctly
@berndruecker

57. Synchronous
Facade
Blocking Call

58. Example
Payment
Seat
ReservationBooking
Ticket
Generation
REST
Simulate synchronicty by waiting
(callback or polling)

59. Compare to e.g. AMQP
https://www.rabbitmq.com/tutorials/tutorial-six-java.html

60. Code

61. Push the facade towards the edge as far as possble
Payment
Seat
ReservationBooking
Ticket
Generation
REST

62. Summary
• To increase responsiveness and take responsibility in services
seriously, you need some degree of asynchronicity and allow
long running services
• A workflow engine helps
• If you need synchronous behavior, create a facade, but plan
for failure and push the facade to the edge

63. Thank you!
@berndruecker

64. mail@berndruecker.io
@berndruecker
https://berndruecker.io
https://medium.com/berndruecker
https://github.com/berndruecker
https://www.infoq.com/articles/events-
workflow-automation
Contact:
Slides:
Blog:
Code:
https://www.infoworld.com/article/3254777/
application-development/
3-common-pitfalls-of-microservices-
integrationand-how-to-avoid-them.html
https://thenewstack.io/5-workflow-automation-
use-cases-you-might-not-have-considered/