Open Stack

Hi Noy, 

The short answer is No, BPMN is currently not supported, and No, we didn’t hear requests to support it yet. It is architecturally feasible but is a substantial effort, and not on the current roadmap. 

The longer answer is: Both Mistral DSL and BPMN come from the common root of workflow body of knowledge, The Workflow Reference Model. However specifics choices of 1) supported workflow patterns 2) syntax to express and 3) visual representations and 4) target users are all different, given the differences in the domain. Business processes are quite complex, and business users are much less technical, this forced more complexity into the workflow and workflow definition language - to express more visually and abstract it from “the code”. 

Industry experience with applying workflow to IT automation shown that few patterns are commonly used in the field. And technical IT users don’t hesitate dealing with the code (rather hesitate dealing with graphical tools or any tools that constraint them). 

Mistral DSL tried to strike the balance between using of workflow as a powerful abstraction, and keeping it simple, with minimal patterns to support typical IT operations. 

Mistral as workflow service is architecturally capable of supporting another workflow language; it’s a matter of writing workflow handler that supports  BMPN syntax and implements underlying workflow logic.

Practically, however, BPMN may be too far away: it’s XML not YAML, it’s a different way to refer data, therefore an implementation may reviel more places were adjustments will be required. 

Hope this helps.

Cheers, 
Dmitri.


There’s no plans 
On Jul 23, 2015, at 1:05 AM, ITZIKOWITZ, Noy (Noy) <noy.itzikowitz at alcatel-lucent.com> wrote:

> Hi,
> We had a question from our OSS team about the level of support of BPMN in Mistral,
> Is there any plan to include that support? Did you heard from other people on the community around the need for that?
> 
> Thanks,
> Noy
> __________________________________________________________________________
> OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions)
> Unsubscribe: OpenStack-dev-request at lists.openstack.org?subject:unsubscribe
> http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/attachments/20150804/dc68bace/attachment.html>