Speaker: Bernd Rücker

Event-driven architectures are on the rise. They promise both better decoupling of components by using an event bus and improved scalability in terms of throughput. Decoupled modules help to scale your software development efforts itself. Event streaming promises to handle ever-growing amounts of "data in motion" in real-time, event sourcing allows us to time travel, and domain events have turned out to be powerful building blocks that lead to a better understanding of underlying business requirements.  

But there are also pitfalls that you’d better be aware of. For example event-notifications used inappropriately can lead to tighter coupling or cyclic dependencies between components. It is also easy to lose sight of flows across service boundaries, making it hard to understand how core business logic is actually implemented. This can get even worse if you lack tooling to get insights into your event flows. Last but not least, the event-driven approach is not well-understood by most developers or business analysts, making it hard for companies to adopt. In this talk, I will quickly go over the concepts, the advantages, and the pitfalls of event-driven utopia. Whenever possible, I will share real-life stories or point to source code examples.

New tools and frameworks have popped up around workflow automation, sometimes framed as microservice orchestration engines. Many of these got their start "organically", where companies built a tool to solve their own problem. From Airbnb came Apache Airflow, from Netflix came Conductor, from Uber came Cadence, Amazon offers Step Functions, Google has Cloud Composer, and Camunda is working on Zeebe.

So workflow automation is far more than human task management or the "BPM dinosaur". In this talk I discuss typical use cases of workflow automation, dive into philosophies and flow languages of relevant tools, and show concrete code examples and live demos. I will not only wear a developer's hat but also look at operations, DevOps and the link to business stakeholders. Afterwards, you'll better understand the role of workflow automation in your project and have some initial criteria for selecting a tool.

As co-founder of a workflow automation vendor, I am definitely opinionated - but as workflow automation addict with 15 years of real-world experience, the presentation will be rooted in the frontline customer engagements that have formed those opinions.