Join our R&D team to learn how using the Digital Enterprise Suite (DES) allows to integrate with Apache Kafka to consume and produce messages by processes and decisions. This webinar targets a technical audience (Enterprise Architects, Software Developers) with a basic knowledge of Apache Kafka.

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Apache Kafka event
streams with Processes and
Decisions
Maciej Swiderski, Automation Lead at Trisotech
Simon Ringuette, R&D Lead at Trisotech

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Stay up to date
“The Only Constant in Life Is Change”
Heraclitus
 More and more information is being produced every day, every hour, every minute , every second
 Organizations must be ready for a change at any point in time
 Staying up to date is one of the most important aspect of digital transformation
 At the same time, staying up to date is also the biggest challenge

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Events and Event streams
 Events are the data snippets that represent something that happened
o Order was placed
o File was deleted
o User registered
 Event streams are flows of events sharing a particular type
 Apache Kafka is one of the distributed streaming platform that took
an established position in handling events and event streams
 Trisotech Digital Enterprise Suite integrates with Apache Kafka as
o Consumer of event streams
o Producer of events

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DES as Apache Kafka consumer
 Digital Enterprise Suite can act as a consumer of event streams via trigger mechanisms that are available for
workflow processes
 Events can be used to
o Start new instance of the process for each incoming event
o Trigger already active process instances
o Cancel already active process instances
 Events can be correlated to effectively associate incoming events with active process instances
o Correlation based on event body (Kafka record value)
o Correlation based on event key (Kafka record key)
o Correlation based on event headers (Kafka record headers)

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DES as Apache Kafka Producer
 Digital Enterprise Suite can also be used as event producer on Kafka topics
 Operation that publishe events on defined topics
o Publishing operations are available in both decisions (as BKM) and processes (as service task)
o Publishing operations are explicitly defined within the model
o Structure of the published events are defined by the modeler
 Event emitters publish asynchronous events from within Digital Enterprise Suite
o Event emitters are declared based on asynchronous events produced by DES itself
• Service invocation events are of most interest but there are others as well
o Structure of the events are always based on the Cloud Event specification with Kafka binding
• Binary
• Structured

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Configuration
 Configuration of Apache Kafka integration depends on requirements (such as consumer vs producer,
operation or event emitter) but the common parts that are required are
o First and foremost is the Apache Kafka Cluster itself
o Credentials to access the Apache Kafka Cluster
o Topic(s)
• It is recommended to create topics upfront and not rely on auto creation of topics
o Partitions and number of instances of Digital Enterprise Suite integrated with it
• Keep number of partitions on par with DES instances for the best performance

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The example

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EU Rent
Handling of car incidents
 The example is based on EU Rent - a fictional car rental company
 Use case covered is to handle car incidents with
o Decision service that determines where the repair will take place
• On the road
• In the shop
o In case repair requires taking car to the shop this will automatically trigger process that handles
complete scenario of either fixing the car or replacing it with another
o When a car replacement is required, process will delegate that to another service
 With that in mind there are three services involved
o Decision service to determine the repair location
o Process service to take care of car repair or replacement
o Dealer service to replace the car

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Service interaction
Determine
repair location
Decision service
Handle car
breakdown
Process service
Dealer car
replacement
3rd party service
Apache Kafka
Incident-reports
Car-replacements

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Demo

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React to change instantly
 Staying up to date with constantly changing world is a must
 Being able to react to the changes rather than not being aware of them is a matter of staying alive
 Events and event streams allow systems and the organization to keep up with the changes
 Use of Apache Kafka, a well established and mature platform, makes things way more approachable
 Combining that with automation platforms like Digital Enterprise Suite enables event driven services that are
resilient and up to date

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Questions