Friedbert Samland from Deutsche Telekom IT and Willm Tüting from their technology partner conology presented on Telekom IT (the internal IT provider for Deutsche Telekom) migrating from monolithic systems to a microservices architecture while also moving from waterfall to Agile development methodologies. In 2017, they had a number of significant problems with their monolithic system for wholesale orders: time to market for new features was 12+ months, lots of missing functionality that required manual steps, vendor lock-in, large (therefore risky and time-consuming) releases, and more.
They tried a variety of approaches to alleviate these problems, such as a partial Agile environment, but needed something more radical to make a difference. They identified four major drivers: microservices, cloud, SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) and devops. I’m sure everyone in the audience was familiar with those concepts, but they went through how this actually works in a large organization like this, where it’s not always as easy as the providers say it will be. They learned a lot of lessons the hard way, such as the long learning curve of moving to cloud.
They were migrating a system built on the Oracle BPEL engine, starting by partitioning the monolith in terms of data and functionality (logic and processes) in order to identify three categories of microservices: business process microservices, data microservices, and domain-specific microservices. They balanced orchestration and choreography with a “choreographed orchestration” of the microservices, where the (Camunda) process orchestrations were embedded within the microservices for handling processes and inter-service communication. By having separate Camunda instances with separate databases for each microservice (which provides a high degree of scalability), they had to enhance the monitoring to get an aggregated view of all of the process flows.
This is a great example of a real-world large-scale implementation where a proprietary and monolithic iBPMS just would not work for the architecture that Telekom IT needed: Camunda BPM is embedded in the services, it doesn’t pre-suppose fixed orchestration at the top level of an application.
Although we’re just halfway through the last day, this was my last session at CamundaCon, I’m headed south for a short weekend break then DecisionCamp in Bolzano next week. Thanks to the entire Camunda team for putting on a great event, and inviting me to give a keynote yesterday.
Thank you for this nice article about our presentation