Is BPM Dead, Long Live Microservices? By Luis Weir

With the massive uptake of Microservices Architecture -industry wide- and with it, the adoption of patterns such as Event Sourcing, CQRS and Saga as the means for Microservices to asynchronously communicate with each and effectively "choreograph" business processes, it might seem as if the days of process orchestration using BPM engines (e.g. Oracle Process Cloud now also part of Oracle Integration Cloud, Pega, Appian, etc) or BPEL (or BPEL-like) engines are over.

Although the use of choreography and associated patterns (such as the aforementioned) makes tons of sense in many use cases, I’ve come across a number of them where choreography can be impractical.

Some examples:

• Data needs to be collected and aggregated from multiple services -e.g. check the Microservice.io Composition pattern. Note that this pattern doesn’t necessarily implies that an orchestration is required. Could be that data is collected and aggregated (not transformed) into a single response. But if data collected from multiple sources needs to also be transformed into a common response payload, then it feels pretty close to one of the typical use cases for orchestration.
• The process is human-centric and can’t be fully automated. Basically at some point a human has to take an action in other for the process to complete (e.g. approval of a credit card application, or a credit check) -BPM/Orchestration tools tend to be quite good at this.
• There is a need to have very clear visibility of the end to end business processes. In traditional BPM tools, this is fairly straight forward, with Choreography / Events, although possible to monitor individual events, a form of correlation would be required to build an end to end view on the status of a business process. Read the complete article here.

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