Is Zeebe Production ready?

About Zeebe
#1

Hi
I’m evaluating to introduce Zeebe Enterprise to a my customer for a new project who Zeebe seems to meet requirements.

I’ve read some documentation, but before to propose such solution to my customer I would like to get into with some questions about some requirements:

  • How much Zeebe is mature ? Are there some production use cases?
  • Which are performance stats?
  • Are some official and/or production ready diagnostic tools available?
  • Could you provide a comparison or explain differences between Zeebe and Netflix Conductor?
  • Can Zeebe Enterprise be deployed within Google Cloud?
  • Giving that Camunda and Zeebe are different products, what can be best solution to use Camunda + Kafka instead of Zeebe (in case Zeebe is not fully ready)?
  • Does Zeebe Enterprise prodution ready to use Kafka? (because kafka is mandatory for our project)
  • What are the main critical issues?

As Camunda Team admirer I was forgetting to congratulate with you for the continued and nice work!

Best regards

1 Like
#2

Hey “User0409”.

Wow - that are a lot of questions :slight_smile: Probably it would be easier to get in touch with us directly and hop on a call to discuss the use case & scenario?

I try to answer here as well - but some questions might need some more discussion:

  • How much Zeebe is mature ? Are there some production use cases?

There are production use cases, yes. But we are still in a 0.x state - so not the same guarantees as with Camunda BPM yet.

  • Which are performance stats?

This depends on so many factors that I can’t give a general answer. It would start with the question what you mean by performance (throughput? latency?).

  • Are some official and/or production ready diagnostic tools available?

What do you exactly search for, what do you want to diagnose?

  • Could you provide a comparison or explain differences between Zeebe and Netflix Conductor?

We don’t have a prepared piece on this and it would qualify for an forum or blog post on its own. Maybe this already helps: https://zeebe.io/blog/2019/03/zeebe-comparison-evaluation-criteria/. My spontaneous main points are the use of BPMN in Zeebe (ISO-standard, mature language, supports all important workflow patterns, allows graphical modeling, has a visual that different target groups can understand) and that Zeebe is driven by an open source vendor vs. Conductor is just a project from Netflix put OSS with no guarantees.

  • Can Zeebe Enterprise be deployed within Google Cloud?

Yes. You can also get this as managed service with https://camunda.com/products/cloud/

  • Giving that Camunda and Zeebe are different products, what can be best solution to use Camunda + Kafka instead of Zeebe (in case Zeebe is not fully ready)?

Sorry - I don’t understand the question fully. Of course you can use Kafka + Camunda, we have multiple customers doing so.

  • Does Zeebe Enterprise prodution ready to use Kafka? (because kafka is mandatory for our project)

Sorry, don’t get the exact question.

  • What are the main critical issues?

Of what exactly? Zeebe? I can’t give a list - but I would say: We can still learn things that require some refactoring, so we might need to break API’s (that’s why 0.x). Of course we try to avoid that.
And we learn a lot from early adapter on high load, which helps us stabilizing the product. But distributed systems are complex and I am sure there are still bugs in Zeebe (show me one software without ;-)). But I am confident as we have a world-class team that is really good at resolving critical issues quickly. So what I am saying is simply: It is of course still early stage :slight_smile:

Happy to discuss the concrete use case and how we can tackle that best!

Best
Bernd

2 Likes
#3

About Conductor:

Conductor requires (in production) a lot of other infrastructure pieces (like cluster managers, database, and so forth). It evolved in Netflix’s internal IT infra, where these things are available as services, so if you want to use it, you have to pull those deps in and manage them.

Zeebe on the other hand is designed more as a product - a self-sufficient black box with no required dependencies.

Related to this, Conductor evolves in response to Netflix’s requirements, and is not as driven by customer/user community feedback.

3 Likes
Comparison between Zeebe and Conductor
#4

Thank for reply @berndruecker and sorry for delay and lot of questions :slight_smile:

I looked a lot of articles and github repos about Zeebe, catching our attention to consider Zeebe very interesting and powerful so we’d like to get more about.

If you’re available I would be pleasure and very interesting to discuss in.

If available I’d like to know as you some reference about where is used and what about Enterprise lincence support

Thanks again, best regards

#5

Can you send me a direct message? bernd.ruecker@camunda.com. Then I can easily put you in contact with the right people internally to discuss references & enterprise options.