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Practical Process Automation: Orchestration and Integration in Microservices and Cloud Native Architectures
In today� s IT architectures, microservices and serverless functions play increasingly important roles in process automation. But how do you create meaningful, comprehensive, and connected business solutions when the individual components are decoupled and independent by design? Targeted at developers and architects, this book presents a framework through examples, practical advice, and use cases to help you design and automate complex processes.
As systems are more distributed, asynchronous, and reactive, process automation requires state handling to deal with long-running interactions. Author Bernd Ruecker demonstrates how to leverage process automation technology like workflow engines to orchestrate software, humans, decisions, or bots.
Learn how modern process automation compares to business process management, service-oriented architecture, batch processing, event streaming, and data pipeline solutions
Understand how to use workflow engines and executable process models with BPMN
Understand the difference between orchestration and choreography and how to balance both
As systems are more distributed, asynchronous, and reactive, process automation requires state handling to deal with long-running interactions. Author Bernd Ruecker demonstrates how to leverage process automation technology like workflow engines to orchestrate software, humans, decisions, or bots.
Learn how modern process automation compares to business process management, service-oriented architecture, batch processing, event streaming, and data pipeline solutions
Understand how to use workflow engines and executable process models with BPMN
Understand the difference between orchestration and choreography and how to balance both
430 pages, Kindle Edition
Published March 16, 2021
31 people are currently reading
137 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
February 19, 2022
This is a book that reconciled me with Businesss process tooling.
First, it laid down theory and what are Business processes good for:
- long living, durable processes that are hard to do in code
- integration of manual tasks on it
- domain visibility of processes
I used to think that low code tooling were kind of bad because they were not CICD compatible and in the end, you ended with something as complex as code.
But this book explained the real differences and when a workflow engine (not to be confused with low code tooling) is actually interesting.
This is the kind of book that makes you rethink some of your internal paradigm. And as a result, it makes me a better technologist overall as it adds new tools to my belt, and the right ways to use them.
I am now looking for a real life project which will allow me to test all the interesting ideas this book has :)
So in a nutshell, this is a highly recommended book if you are dealing with enterprise processes where these kinds of ideas are unfortunately often wrongly applied using monolithic tools chosen by uneducated executives.
First, it laid down theory and what are Business processes good for:
- long living, durable processes that are hard to do in code
- integration of manual tasks on it
- domain visibility of processes
I used to think that low code tooling were kind of bad because they were not CICD compatible and in the end, you ended with something as complex as code.
But this book explained the real differences and when a workflow engine (not to be confused with low code tooling) is actually interesting.
This is the kind of book that makes you rethink some of your internal paradigm. And as a result, it makes me a better technologist overall as it adds new tools to my belt, and the right ways to use them.
I am now looking for a real life project which will allow me to test all the interesting ideas this book has :)
So in a nutshell, this is a highly recommended book if you are dealing with enterprise processes where these kinds of ideas are unfortunately often wrongly applied using monolithic tools chosen by uneducated executives.
December 15, 2025
Before telling my opinion about the book, I'll say that I'm a platform engineer. Most of the time my job is to build in-house CI/CD pipelines, automations, platforms provided as libraries or the whole SDKs on which other developers in company are building products.
So... maybe... my opinion is biased towards this book, because for years I was working in organizations huge enough to have their own problems that can't be covered by general solutions outside. That's why in-house proprietary solutions are created most of the time - to cover problems others can't solve or it will require a huge effort to customize the solution to solve it. Which is sometimes more costly than creating one. But anyway...
This book is not for developers, in my opinion. I mean, not the "classic" ones. Too much content is circling around DSLs to describe business processes which then consumed by generic workflow engine. These DSLs are describing what process to trigger which is some sort of code e.g. Java (as in the book). Transient errors, timeouts, persistence, etc. are covered by the workflow engine and it is kinda magic and should help most of the time.
But I don't believe this is working as described in the book. Sure, there are some scenarios where it can and will work, but again, maybe I'm too biased. Once you become huge enough, you will face lots of challenges that can't be solved without building at least some sort of in-house solution to cover proprietary issues inside the organization. Be it technical or political or both.
I would say that this book is more useful for those who is closer to the business than developers. Like business analysts, for example. Or, I don't know, some sales person who want to automate some part of the job. They need it to be simple enough not to call developers in. But feature rich to really automate something.
I've got myself too wordy here. Yeah, so, in my opinion, this book wasn't for me for sure. I didn't understand the benefit of applying workflow engines whenever we could. Although I do understand the practical use cases for it, I can't say I see it in my day-to-day job. So this book is OK to see and hear how other people solve their problems, but no more than that.
So... maybe... my opinion is biased towards this book, because for years I was working in organizations huge enough to have their own problems that can't be covered by general solutions outside. That's why in-house proprietary solutions are created most of the time - to cover problems others can't solve or it will require a huge effort to customize the solution to solve it. Which is sometimes more costly than creating one. But anyway...
This book is not for developers, in my opinion. I mean, not the "classic" ones. Too much content is circling around DSLs to describe business processes which then consumed by generic workflow engine. These DSLs are describing what process to trigger which is some sort of code e.g. Java (as in the book). Transient errors, timeouts, persistence, etc. are covered by the workflow engine and it is kinda magic and should help most of the time.
But I don't believe this is working as described in the book. Sure, there are some scenarios where it can and will work, but again, maybe I'm too biased. Once you become huge enough, you will face lots of challenges that can't be solved without building at least some sort of in-house solution to cover proprietary issues inside the organization. Be it technical or political or both.
I would say that this book is more useful for those who is closer to the business than developers. Like business analysts, for example. Or, I don't know, some sales person who want to automate some part of the job. They need it to be simple enough not to call developers in. But feature rich to really automate something.
I've got myself too wordy here. Yeah, so, in my opinion, this book wasn't for me for sure. I didn't understand the benefit of applying workflow engines whenever we could. Although I do understand the practical use cases for it, I can't say I see it in my day-to-day job. So this book is OK to see and hear how other people solve their problems, but no more than that.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews