The Engine in Aletyx Enterprise Build of Kogito and Drools 10.0.0¶
At the core of any workflow system lies the engine, a state machine responsible for processing inputs and moving processes between states until they reach a waiting state or completion.
In Apache KIE, the engine is provided by Kogito, which powers both jBPM and SonataFlow. These two frameworks offer different capabilities but share the same engine. In simplified terms, jBPM and SonataFlow expose the engine through their respective domain-specific languages (DSLs)—BPMN and CNCF Serverless Workflow, respectively.
Pluggable and Efficient Persistence¶
One of the key strengths of Apache KIE is its pluggable persistence mechanism, allowing seamless switching between different storage solutions such as PostgreSQL, RocksDB, Infinispan, MongoDB, or FileSystem. Among these, PostgreSQL is the most mature and widely adopted.
The engine employs a de-normalized persistence model, storing only essential data as key/value pairs to maintain efficiency. This is a deliberate design choice, addressing performance bottlenecks faced in previous generations of the engine, where a fully normalized data structure hindered scalability in high-volume environments. By separating runtime data from queryable data, the system ensures optimal performance even under intensive workloads.
