Bonitasoft announced the first delivery of Self-Contained Apps technology in their revolutionary new approach to process automation with the Bonita platform.

Self-Contained Apps apply the "composable enterprise" approach of building business applications from interoperable elements, by combining the benefits of containerization approaches and technologies for deployment and management, with the power of BPM application platform technologies for application development.

Gartner said of the "composable enterprise" concept, "As business needs change, organizations must be able to deliver innovation quickly and adapt applications dynamically - reassembling capabilities from inside and outside the enterprise. To do this, organizations must understand and implement the ‘composable enterprise.'"

Clearly, CIOs are facing pressure from business to support rapid innovation. Self-Contained Apps especially address the need for responsiveness and speed from IT by offering a faster, more efficient way to deploy fully integrated business process applications.

The revolutionary Self Contained Apps approach with Bonita 2023.1 marks a sharp departure from the approach of process-based applications deployed on a platform with shared resources. Each Self-Contained App created with the Bonita process automation platform can be deployed into production via Docker and Kubernetes, with its own runtime and resources. As Self-Contained Apps are independent of the platform, there are a number of time-and-cost saving benefits:

• The less complex, independent development and deployment of Self-Contained Applications means faster application delivery to production overall. As it's not necessary to take interoperability and integration among a group of applications into account during development, development is faster, testing is easier, and the resulting application is easier to maintain.
• Scaling an independent application is simpler, and it can be applied to each application individually.
• Application maintenance costs are reduced, as smaller and more regular updates are now possible.
• Development teams' efficiency and productivity, and therefore ROI, when it's easier to implement multiple projects.

The containerized approach included with Self-Contained Apps is already familiar to CIOs and their technical teams, bringing business process application development into line with other established software development methodologies and practices.

"When asked about Self-Contained Applications, many of our current Bonita customers noted that they are looking forward to creating applications that are independent of a single central business data management system, to reduce downtime for the whole platform, and that they absolutely need the capability of Bonita Central for managing these independent applications," noted Nicolas Chabanoles, Chief Technical and Product Officer at Bonitasoft.

Bonita 2023.1, a major release of the flagship product of Bonitasoft, offers the first technologies to support Self-Contained Apps: containerized deployment capabilities and Bonita Central, the management tool to monitor and control applications running "in the wild" without a single platform in common. With Bonita Central, DevOps can monitor the use of resources, and system admins and process owners can monitor the status of all deployed apps individually.

Bonita Central

Bonita Central also allows Bonita Enterprise users who are currently using multi-tenancy to switch painlessly to the multi-runtime capability of Bonita 2023.1, with a centralized view of their Bonita application portfolio.

"BPM technologies already fit perfectly into the approach of composable architectures. Infrastructures are composed, and we no longer buy machines but CPU, memory, disk space, bandwidth, and so on," says Charles Souillard, CEO and co-founder of Bonitasoft. "Application development already leverages composability: reusable independent processes, sub-processes, connectors, services, reusable pieces of code, business rules, and UI fragments to name a few. Self-Contained Apps offer more application composability for deployment."

The Bonita Community open-source edition includes all capabilities required to develop and deploy process automation projects, and can be downloaded here.