In today's IT architectures, microservices and serverless functions play an increasingly important role. But how can you create meaningful, comprehensive, and connected business solutions if the individual components are decoupled and independent by design? This book provides a framework through examples and practical advice, and reveals how you can design complex processes in such an environment to deliver true business value. Systems that become more distributed, asynchronous, and reactive usually require state handling to deal with long-running interactions. Author Bernd Ruecker demonstrates how to use process automation technology to apply typical long-running patterns around resiliency, messaging, orchestration, or consistency without forcing your service implementation to become stateful itself. With this guide, you'll discover how process automation compares to business process management, service-oriented architecture, batch processing, event streaming, and data pipeline solutions. Learn how to utilize process automation in cloud-scale or low-latency scenarios Explore options for designing architecture that facilitates process automation Learn methods for modeling processes properly to avoid potential pitfalls Understand the difference between orchestration and choreography and how to balance both Examine process automation use cases to learn viable solutions and appreciate the possibilities