Case study · Process migration to Camunda

Berliner WasserbetriebeProcess migration to Camunda and microservices for construction project control

Europe’s largest

water supply and wastewater company as client

> 1 year

runtime of individual migrated process instances

Camunda BPM

instead of a legacy workflow product

OpenShift

microservices instead of a Java EE monolith

Client

Berliner Wasserbetriebe
Project: process migration to Camunda
Industry: Water supply
Headquarters: Berlin

Your contact
Oliver Fromm, Board Member, cimt Group
Oliver Fromm

Board Member, cimt Group

Consulting services
Technologies

Camunda BPM · Java EE, EJB, JMS · Thorntail (WildFly), Quarkus · PostgreSQL, IBM Db2, Hibernate · REST APIs (API first) · Apache CXF · Docker, OpenShift · Keycloak, OAuth / OpenID Connect · Git, Maven · Angular, Ionic

Starting point

Replacing a legacy workflow and a Java EE monolith

Berliner Wasserbetriebe is Europe’s largest water supply and wastewater company. The city’s construction projects in the water and sewer network are managed in an extensive, multi-stage process automation – from planning and control to implementation.

To use a modern, lightweight and more maintainable process engine, a process migration to Camunda BPM from a legacy workflow product was required. The challenge: active process instances, some running for more than a year, also had to be transferred to the new environment. At the same time, the Java EE monolith that had grown over the years was to be replaced step by step by microservices, to simplify deployments and enable faster updates.

Mission

Migrate long-running processes, dismantle the monolith step by step

  • Revise the existing process landscape – including processes that had changed significantly from a business perspective
  • Transfer long-running process instances to the new engine
  • Extract individual services from the monolith and run them as microservices
  • Keep the production system stable throughout the entire restructuring
Solution

Process migration to Camunda with a dedicated migration tool

The processes were modelled with Camunda following best practices. Four building blocks support the solution:

Independent deployments

Functionally separate processes can be deployed independently – so the departments involved can have their requirements implemented on their own.

Migration tool for long runners

A purpose-built tool transfers running instances to the matching step in the new workflow using JSON configuration – including business data.

Microservices on OpenShift

Architecture design based on Docker with OpenShift as runtime environment; existing CI/CD pipelines were enhanced and optimised.

Single sign-on

Authentication and authorisation were connected to an IAM solution based on Keycloak.

Approach

Agile and close to the business users

The solutions were developed in close contact with business users and in short iteration cycles following Scrum. UI/UX experts supported the agile development with mock-ups and prototypes – making requirements visible and verifiable at an early stage.

Result

Result of the process migration to Camunda: all processes transferred

  • All processes, including long runners, successfully migrated to the new engine
  • Significantly simplified deployment process thanks to the new application architecture
  • Step-by-step modernisation during live operation
Next step

Running Camunda 7? Here is how to move to Camunda 8

Many companies run business-critical processes on Camunda 7. As a Camunda Platinum Partner, we support you from the assessment to the migration – or when starting new projects directly on Camunda 8.

Your path to Camunda 8
References

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