Red Hat Bets on Kogito for BPM on Kubernetes
Red Hat has updated its business process management (BPM) platform to take advantage of Kogito, an open source business automation tool that runs natively on Kubernetes.
Phil Simpson, a senior principal product marketing manager for Red Hat, says the subscription to Red Hat Process Automation Platform now provides access to Kogito VSCode Tooling that developers can employ to construct rules-based processes for Kubernetes environments using a familiar Visual Studio construct.
Over time, the entire Red Hat Process Automation Platform will be based on Kogito, as Red Hat looks to make it simpler to employ its BPM platform across multiple clouds and on-premises IT environments, Simpson says. Kogito itself is based on Quarkus, an open source framework Red Hat created for building Java applications that are optimized to run on Kubernetes clusters.
At the same time, Red Hat is tightening integration between Red Hat Process Automation Platform and Apache Kafka, the open source messaging software increasingly used to enable digital processes to span multiple platforms.
Finally, the latest release of Red Hat Process Automation Platform now provides access to heat maps that enable developers to more easily see which processes are being invoked most often.
The level of business process reengineering occurring within enterprises has risen sharply since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Organizations of all sizes have realized that many legacy processes needed to become more extensible. In many cases, those efforts include moving processes created using a Java-based framework, such as the Red Hat Process Automation Platform, to the cloud. Achieving that goal becomes simpler when processes can leverage Kubernetes and containers using Kogito to run anywhere.
Of course, not every custom business process is worth reengineering. For example, as enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications continue to evolve, it may make more sense to replace a legacy custom process with one that has been added to an ERP suite. The only reason that process may have been built in the first place is because there was no equivalent for it in a previous ERP application release.
Of course, there will always be a need for some set of custom processes that enables an organization to truly differentiate itself from every other company using the same ERP software. The challenge, now, is determining which custom processes are truly worth the effort to build and maintain.
There is, naturally, no shortage of tools for building and managing rules-based business processes. However, the number of those BPM tools that currently run on Kubernetes is limited. Red Hat is making a case for building the next generation of BPM tools on a cloud-native platform that enables processes to scale up and down more fluidly as rapidly changing business conditions may warrant.
Regardless of BPM approach, the need to more tightly integrate custom processes with those embedded within a packaged application is only going to increase. That becomes a lot easier to achieve when as many of those processes as possible are running on a cloud-native platform.
