We have been using Camunda 7 extensively in some of our recent projects and one of the features that impressed me/us is how powerful and useful the rest api is.
Does Camunda 8 / Zeebe offer any alternatives with similar functionality in regards to process instance manipulation and/or migration?
From what I have read from the gRPC client api as well as the Operate rest api documentation, I was unable to see any means of performing these kinds of “disaster recovery” / “production hotfix” operations that have previously saved us in our Camunda 7-based projects.
For reference, the topics I have visited / read through so far are:
Camunda 8 gRPC api docs
Camunda Operate api docs
Using custom exporter-implementations
I would love to find something similar to the /modification operations in the Camunda 7 rest api, but any additional ways of interacting directly with the engine would be great.
Also for reference, we are currently investigating / tinkering with a self-managed deployment of Camunda Platform 8 (currently just through Docker on local machines, but later hosted in k8s).
So far Camunda 8 does not feature any possibilities to modify and migrate process instances. Due to this you were not able to find such operations in the API documentation. For sure this feature is in our Backlog but it will need some time until it’s being released.
If you are interested in interacting with the engine directly maybe zbctl is something which is interesting for you.
Process instance modification is planned for the next minor release Camunda Platform 8.1 (2022 Q3). It will be available via gRPC API and we are also working on the integration for Camunda Operate.
Currently, we are working on the creation of a process instance at an arbitrary element.
I had briefly read up on the CLI, but from what I could gather, it was mostly for interfacing with Camunda Cloud installations, and not really relevant for self-managed deployments. (It is definitely cool how easy it makes to test out the worker concept however).
Do you have any vague rough guestimates on how far into the future we are talking here?
Would this be something we could expect in Q1 '23 or are we talking more like 2024 at best?
With 8.1 release (October), we brought Process Instance Modification feature. This can help you to repair process instances that ended up in the wrong state by repeating or skipping steps. You can easily move running flow nodes, add new or cancel existing ones via Operate UI.
Did you have a chance to check this feature? Does it work as expected or do you miss something there?
