Slides from my talk at OOP 2021: Rethink business processes and user experience to leverage the full potential of your hipster architecture

1. Rethink Processes and User Experience
to Leverage The Full Potential Of Your
Hipster Architecture
Bernd Ruecker
bernd.ruecker@camunda.com | @berndruecker

2. What word do you think of when I say
"hipster architecture"?
ⓘ Start presenting to display the poll results on this slide.

3. Shall we use a workflow
engine for ticket booking?
Yeah, I think so…
But we don‘t need state.
We implement a synchronous
RESTAPI

4. One day in 2019…
Source: https://www.faz.net/aktuell/technik-motor/motor/simulierte-notlandung-am-stuttgarter-flughafen-
14503711.html

5. Shall we use a workflow
engine for ticket booking?
Yeah, I think so…
But we don‘t need state.
We implement a synchronous
RESTAPI
Wait - why?
Customers need to get
the PDF ticket right
away - to print it out
…???...
And if some service required to
book the ticket is misbehaving,
slow or unavailable?
…???...
Customers can‘t book and
get an error message
Yeah – I know this behavor from
other booking sites – I hate it
The synchronous response is a
business requirement… There is
nothing we can do about it
Well, good luck…

6. Can you share own examples of similar
problems?
ⓘ Start presenting to display the poll results on this slide.

7. Let‘s talk about food

8. How does ordering Pizza work?
Pizza
Place
You
Phone Call
Synchronous blocking communication
Feedback loop (ack, confirmation or rejection)
Temporal coupling (e.g. busy, not answering)
Pizza
Place
You
Email
Asynchronous non-blocking communication
No temporal coupling
Pizza
Place
You
A feedback loop might make sense
(ack, confirmation or rejection)
Email
Confirmation Email

9. Feedback loop != result
Pizza
Place
You
Email
Confirmation Email
Pizza Delivery
Feedback (ACK, confirmation, rejection)
Result

10. Synchronous blocking behavior for the result?
Bad user experience
Does not scale well

11. Scalable Coffee Making
https://www.enterpriseintegrationpatterns.com/ramblings/18_starbucks.html
Photo by John Ingle
@berndruecker

12. Scalable Pizza making
La Pizza Cresci Cannes
https://www.maison-cresci.com/
from http://www.travellingsnail.com/content/la-pizza-cresci-cannes

13. PUT/order
Synchronous results?
Pizza
Place
You
Pizza Delivery
HTTP 200
The task of
Pizza making is
long running

14. Only the first communication step is synchronous
Pizza
Place
You
PUT/order
HTTP 200
Pizza Delivery
The task of
Pizza making is
long running

15. https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/why-performance-
mattersvhttps://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/why-performance-matters
• Pinterest increased traffic and sign-
ups by 15% when they reduced
perceived wait times by 40%.
• COOK increased conversions by 7%,
decreased bounce rates by 7%, and
increased pages per session by 10%
when they reduced average page
load time by 850 milliseconds.
• The BBC found they lost an
additional 10% of users for every
additional second their site took to
load.
• DoubleClick found 53% of mobile
site visits were abandoned if a page
took longer than 3 seconds to load.

16. Example
@berndruecker

17. Example
Payment
Seat
Reservation
Booking
Ticket
Generation

18. Architecture
Payment
Seat
Reservation
Booking
Ticket
Generation
Kafka
AMQP
REST

19. Long running…
The task of
ticket booking is
potentially
long running
Payment
Seat
Reservation
Booking
Ticket
Generation
Kafka
AMQP
REST

20. @berndruecker
sync

22. That is hard to implement
Payment
Seat
Reservation
Booking
Ticket
Generation
Kafka
AMQP
REST
REST

23. Workflow engines can help :-)
Payment
Seat
Reservation
Booking
Ticket
Generation
REST

24. Workflow engines can help :-)
Payment
Seat
Reservation
Booking
Ticket
Generation
REST
Process Automation:
Is stateful
Can wait
Can retry
Can escalate
Can compensate

25. But…

26. Weaknesses
Payment
Seat
Reservation
Booking
Ticket
Generation
REST

27. Weaknesses: Availabiliy erosion
Payment
Seat
Reservation
Booking
Ticket
Generation
REST
99 % uptime
99 % uptime
99 % uptime
96 % uptime

28. Weaknesses: Latency creep
Payment
Seat
Reservation
Booking
Ticket
Generation
REST
300 ms
1150 + x ms
600 ms
250 ms

29. Weaknesses: user experience around failure handling
Payment
Seat
Reservation
Booking
Ticket
Generation
REST

31. Can your company
leverage your
hipster architecture?
Shutterstock
You need to
change business
processes and
customer
experience!

32. Redesign your business process accordingly!
Payment
Seat
Reservation
Booking
Ticket
Generation
REST

33. Redesign your business process accordingly!
Payment
Seat
Reservation
Booking
Ticket
Generation
REST
Feedback Loop
Result

34. Synchronous
Facade
Blocking Call

35. Example
Payment
Seat
Reservation
Booking
Ticket
Generation
REST
Simulate synchronicty by waiting
(callback or polling)

36. Push the facade towards the edge as far as possble
Payment
Seat
Reservation
Booking
Ticket
Generation
REST

37. What type of communication do you
mostly use?
ⓘ Start presenting to display the poll results on this slide.

38. Does your business roles understand the
impact on business processes and
customer experience?
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39. Live hacking

40. Warning:
Contains Opinion
@berndruecker

41. mail@berndruecker.io
@berndruecker
http://berndruecker.io/
Bernd Ruecker
Co-founder and
Chief Technologist of
Camunda

42. Camunda
• Source-available & developer-friendly process automation platform
• Supports BPMN
• Mature tooling, widely adopted
• On-prem or cloud
• http://camunda.com/

43. https://github.com/berndruecker/ticket-booking-camunda-cloud

44. Live hacking

45. User Experience

46. Takes a while

47. Takes a while

48. Takes a while

49. Takes a while

51. HTTP
500
HTTP
200

53. THIS!

57. HTTP
202
HTTP
200

59. Summary
• To increase resiliency and responsiveness, you need some
degree of asynchronicity and allow long running services
• A workflow engine helps you
• If you need synchronous behavior, create a facade, but plan
for failure and push the facade to the edge

60. Thank you!
@berndruecker

61. Audience Q&A Session
ⓘ Start presenting to display the audience questions on this slide.

62. mail@berndruecker.io
@berndruecker
https://berndruecker.io
https://medium.com/berndruecker
https://github.com/berndruecker
https://www.infoq.com/articles/events-
workflow-automation
Contact:
Slides:
Blog:
Code:
https://www.infoworld.com/article/3254777/
application-development/
3-common-pitfalls-of-microservices-
integrationand-how-to-avoid-them.html
https://thenewstack.io/5-workflow-automation-
use-cases-you-might-not-have-considered/