Camunda Reviews

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.

Camunda has licensing per process. There should be a different kind of licensing so that a company with thousands of microservices doesn't have to pay per process. It would be very useful for us. Their current licensing is very difficult for us to maintain. When you have a lot of processes running, it becomes very expensive very quickly. It has a Postgres database at the backend, and it is very difficult to scale if you increase the number of processes running. We did hit some barriers. We were able to overcome them, but it was a problem. Camunda has another product called Camunda Cloud, which supposedly doesn't have the same scalability problems, but we are not using Camunda Cloud because the set of features is smaller than Camunda On-Premises. So, its scalability can be improved. Because it has a single database, it is more difficult to scale if you have a huge success. We use our deployment pipeline to deploy the BPMN process. We have a continuous deployment system where when you finish your development, you are able to deploy the BPMN file as well. Sometimes, when the engineers are deploying several BPMN processes in parallel, we receive an error for Camunda, and we are unable to do the deployment. It is a very specific issue, but we have found that automatic BPMN process deployments sometimes fail in Camunda. When we try to deploy several at once, the system isn't strong or robust enough. So, there is room for improvement.

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.