Different modes of Console

There are no distinct modes neither for development nor production environment. This comes in handy when you need to grant an access to operations for their day-to-day routine and you don’t wanna let them modify all server settings. For example, you just wanna restrict the permission to deploy new processes, start and stop services.

Reliable fall over

Maybe this question is more on the side of infrastructure. As BPMS fully lives in a DB typical solution consists of cloning a production DB to a backup DB instance. In case of a failure, this instance is started.  If some kind of inconsistency gets into the DB during the crash of the main instance then it is immediately replicated to a backup instance. Does it make sense to start a backup instance?

Lack of data archive procedures

The solution itself doesn’t offer any procedure how to archive completed processes. Because of legal restrictions specific to the business domain, you are working in you cannot simply delete completed processes.  As your DB grow in size the response time of BPMS grows as well. You can easily get into trouble with time-out policy. Data growth 200GB per month is feasible. You cannot simply work this problem out by using some advanced features of the underlying DB like partitioning because you wanna have processes which logically belongs together in one archive. You will be struggling to find out such partitioning criteria which could be used in practice and fulfils mentioned requirement.

Process upgrade

One of the killer features,  process migration of already running processes to an upgraded version works only in case of small changes of the process. Moreover what if your process consumes an external WS which lives completely on its own? What if someone enhances that service and modify that interface? Yea, versioning of the interfaces comes to attention. Having process upgrade feature without versioned interfaces is almost nonsense or at least need a special attention while releasing. Even with versioned interfaces, it is not applicable in all situations, eg. sending new data field which presence in the system is not guaranteed.  In large companies, this feature is a must. Otherwise, it is hard to manage and coordinate all the releases of all connected application.

Consider product roadmap

Actually, this item belongs to project planning phase where we make decisions about what technology to use. In some environment like banking, insurance etc. there can be legal requirements to have all products from production environment supported by a vendor. If the vendor’s release strategy is a new major version every half a year and support scope is current major version plus two major back then this could pose a problem for a product maintenance team during the product lifecycle. Migration of all non terminated processes may not be a trivial thing and as such this represents an extra cost.

Conclusion

This post summarize our exeprience with the BPMS system in production. What are your lessones leared from production environment? What feature did you missed or find really useful for production enviroment? Let me know in the comment section bellow.