What is BPM?
Business Process Management (BPM) is a structured approach to the improvement of the processes that organisations use to get work done, to serve their customers, and to create business value.
BPM software products have been developed to support large-scale business change, as some organisations' business processes have become too large and complex to manage without automated tools.
Microservices
IT applications used to be developed as large, carefully designed, monolithic blocks. The difficulty of refactoring features for use in other applications was one of the problems with these application architectures. The advent of service-oriented architecture (SOA) at the beginning of the current millennium was intended to change this situation. The aim was to break down applications into manageable, large services. These could then be assembled and reused. The next stage of modern architectures has now been created by companies such as Amazon, Netflix and Twitter: microservices.
To meet the dynamic needs of modern applications, microservices architectures focus on rapid change. While high service dependencies were often a problem in SOA architectures, independence is a key goal of microservices architectures, which are designed for replacement.
To ensure independent service lifecycles, stable interfaces must be created. This is done primarily through asynchronous REST APIs (Representational State Transfer, Application Programming Interface). The deployment and independent scaling of individual services is further supported by high fault tolerance and local data storage.
Benefits of microservices deployment
Scalability: This architecture is easily scalable due to the decentralisation of microservices. Additional instances of the solution can be easily deployed without overloading the entire system.
Ability to change: Even if a monolith is well designed, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain as the system grows. At some point, the code will need to be refactored. Microservices offer greater convenience because the solution can be easily rebuilt and new instances added.
Reliability: The fault tolerance of the overall system is increased through the isolation of microservices.
Rapid deployment: Individual microservices are easier to develop, test and deploy than complex monoliths.
Broader technology stack: Different technologies, programming languages and frameworks can be used to build each microservice.
Confidence in microservices in the business environment is already growing, analysts say. According to a study carried out last year by CNews Analytics and Inforsistema Jet, 45% of companies with an internal IT team use this technology in production and 23% in a test environment. Growth in both indicators is likely to be stimulated by the new constraints this year.
How BPM can be used in a microservices architecture
Business process management systems (BPMS) or workflow/process engines are used in SOA-type architectures for comprehensive service orchestration in support of business processes. In contrast, free combination of services rather than comprehensive orchestration is the main idea behind microservices. Therefore, at first glance, the concept of an independent microservices architecture seems to be contradicted by central architecture components such as BPMS.
In reality, it is rare to come across a pure form of microservices architecture. Each organisation develops solutions that suit them individually. Managing through BPMS usually reduces the changeability of the entire system compared to pure microservices. However, it also provides centralised control and easier integration of legacy IT systems. Overall, BPM solutions can be an effective complement to a microservices architecture.
iiii Tech's integration solutions ensure compatibility, stable operation and automation of complex processes that involve multiple business systems in a short period of time.
