CamundaCon 2019: Monolith to microservices at Deutsche Telekom

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.

Willm Tüting and Friedbert Samland presenting on the problems with Telekom IT’s monolithic wholesale ordering system

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.

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