With the increased prevalence of automation, service integration and electronic data collection, it is prudent for any business to take a step back and review the design and efficiency of its business processes. Paired with container technologies, business process management can be further enhanced by increasing deployment efficiency, environmental flexibility, and collaboration.

A business process is a defined set of business activities that represents the steps required to achieve a business objective. It includes the flow and use of information and resources. Business Process Management (BPM) is a systematic approach to defining, executing, managing and refining business processes. Processes typically involve both machine and human interactions, integrate with various internal and external systems, and include both static and dynamic flows that are subject to both business rules and technical constraints.

Container technologies, such as Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.3, allow for simplified bundling of an entire runtime environment, including the application, its dependencies, libraries, configuration, and more. By packaging the project in such a way, differences in OS distributions and underlying infrastructures are abstracted away, thus allowing for simplified replication and deployment across multiple environments such as development, testing, and production.

This reference architecture reviews utilization of the kie-server capabilities built into Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite (BPMS) 6.3 and walks through the design, implementation and deployment of a sample BPM application to Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform which utilizes a PatternFly and AngularJS-based UI alongside the exposed REST and Java application interfaces to provide a custom-built, business-specific interface rather than demonstrating the process monitoring and management capabilities of business-central. Within time and scope constraints, potential challenges are discussed, along with common solutions to each problem. A repository is provided that can be cloned directly to reproduce the application assets and mimic OpenShift deployments as seen herein. Artifacts, including supporting code, are included in the repository.