The Redesign of BPA Platforms is Long Overdue
by Nicolas Chabanoles, Bonitasoft CTO and VP Product
Business process automation platforms rule today in digital transformation
For well over a decade, business process management, optimization, and automation platforms have played a critical role in digital transformation.
Today's platforms are flexible, reliable, scalable, and integrate well via APIs with a host of popular third-party software, as well as legacy applications running on everything from mainframes to the cloud. These integrations make BPA platforms valuable tools for organizations to adopt and adapt to digital technologies across their activities.
However, these platforms come with a significant drawback. Services run on any BPA platform all use the same system resources and application runtime engine. Because multiple business workflows depend on the same platform service, all processes and workflows are impacted if the platform or any of its services go down or are taken offline for any reason: for maintenance and update, for example. In very large organizations with thousands of concurrent workflows, this can create large-scale operational roadblocks and expensive downtime until the service is restored.
What changes will we see to BPA platforms in the future?
For years now, virtual machines and containers have been used to break apart siloed application stacks into more loosely-coupled components that run independently of each other. These microservices architectures are, in large part, responsible for the massive scalability and reliability of today's cloud-based services, such as Netflix, Facebook, Twitter, and many others.
Following the same logic, BPA could generate applications that would behave like a service in a microservice architecture. Unlike microservices, which still allow shared services, the BPM service in this new architectural approach would not be shared. Instead, these services would become a dedicated resource supporting an individual workflow or business process. Other workflows and business processes that need the same BPM service would, likewise, have a dedicated resource. This approach means that each business process runs in isolation, separate from the other business processes in the organization. For the business, this means each process can be managed, modified, updated, and scaled independently – increasing overall uptime and availability across the board.
"From a technology perspective, container base deployments allow IT and developers to create and run infrastructure-agnostic apps--freeing up time and resources for more value-added activities. It also fits nicely into today’s agile software development methodologies."
- Nicolas Chabanoles, Bonitasoft CTO and VP Product
