8.9 Release announcements
Supported environment changes and breaking changes or deprecations for the Camunda 8.9 release.
| Minor release date | Scheduled end of maintenance | Release notes | Upgrade guides |
|---|---|---|---|
| 14 April 2026 | 13 October 2028 | 8.9 release notes | - |
- See release notes to learn more about new features and enhancements.
- Refer to the quality board for an overview of known bugs by component and severity.
Key changes
Supported environments
OpenJDK 25 support
Camunda 8.9 adds certification for OpenJDK 25 across the Orchestration Cluster, Connectors, Optimize, and supporting tooling. You can now run Self-Managed deployments on OpenJDK 21–25 without additional configuration changes.
Elasticsearch minimum version raised to 8.18.6+
The minimum supported Elasticsearch version for the Orchestration cluster and Optimize is now 8.18.6 (previously 8.17.3). This aligns with the updated ELASTICSEARCH_VERSION=8.18.6 default used by Camunda 8 Run, Docker Compose, and Helm templates. Upgrade your Elasticsearch/OpenSearch clusters before moving to Camunda 8.9 to avoid compatibility issues.
Agentic orchestration
MCP Client and MCP Remote Client connectors
Breaking changes are introduced in alpha 2 to the element templates and the runtime configuration of the MCP Client.
To resolve this, you must update both the MCP Client and MCP Remote Client connectors to use the element template version 1.
To learn more, see the MCP documentation.
Data
RDBMS secondary storage
Camunda 8.9 introduces optional RDBMS secondary storage as an alternative to Elasticsearch or OpenSearch.
This enables teams to use relational databases such as H2, PostgreSQL, Oracle, or MariaDB for storing and querying process data, reducing operational complexity for non-high-performance use cases.
To learn more, see the 8.9.0-alpha1 release notes.
MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server secondary storage support
Camunda 8.9 extends RDBMS secondary storage to include MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server as additional options for the Orchestration cluster.
To learn more, see the 8.9.0-alpha1 release notes.
Deployment
Standardized JDBC driver management for RDBMS
Camunda 8.9 adds a standardized JDBC driver management system for manual installations.
- A new
/driver-libdirectory separates Camunda-bundled drivers from customer-supplied ones. - Customers can add and configure their own drivers (for example, Oracle JDBC), while maintaining full compliance and version control.
To learn more, see the 8.9.0-alpha1 release notes.
Helm chart values.yaml options for RDBMS
Camunda 8.9 adds RDBMS configuration options to the Helm chart's values.yaml file. See orchestration.data.secondaryStorage.rdbms for details.
- Postgresql is currently supported.
- Other RDBMS databases like OracleDB and MariaDB have limited functionality now, but will be fully supported in future alpha releases.
- Operate is not yet supported with RDBMS until alpha3.
Modeler
Web Modeler: RDBMS support (H2, MariaDB, MySQL)
Camunda 8.9 adds support for H2, MariaDB, and MySQL as relational databases for Web Modeler.
This enhancement aligns Web Modeler’s database configuration with the Orchestration cluster, ensuring consistent setup and improved integration across environments.
To learn more, see the 8.9.0-alpha1 release notes.
Web Modeler: Logging framework changed from Logback to Apache Log4j 2
Web Modeler now uses Apache Log4j 2 for logging, in alignment with what the Orchestration Cluster uses.
This enhancement ensures consistency across environments and simplifies setup for administrators.
To learn more, see the 8.9.0-alpha2 release notes.
Web Modeler: Default logging format changed
By default, Web Modeler's restapi component now logs in a simple, readable format to the console instead of JSON.
This change aligns with the current Orchestration Cluster logging default as defined in its logging configuration.
To learn more, see the 8.9.0-alpha2 release notes.
Web Modeler: JSON format changes
When using JSON as the output for the logs the structure has slightly changed:
logger: This field is now renamed tologgerName.thread: Previously represented the name of the thread. Now we have an object namedthreadContextwith a fieldnamethat has this value.
See Logging documentation for more information.
To learn more, see the 8.9.0-alpha2 release notes.
Web Modeler: Embedded web server changed from Undertow to Tomcat
Web Modeler now uses Apache Tomcat as an embedded web server instead of Undertow. This aligns with the Orchestration Cluster.
This enhancement ensures consistency across environments and simplifies setup for administrators.
To learn more, see the 8.9.0-alpha2 release notes.
Web Modeler: Invite collaborators who haven't logged in before
The behavior across OIDC providers is now aligned. Invitation suggestions only include users who have logged in at least once. This is a breaking change for Web Modeler installations using Keycloak as the OIDC provider. Before 8.9, Keycloak returned all organization users, including those who had never logged in.
You can now invite users who have not yet logged in to Web Modeler by entering their email address. They will appear as “invited” in the collaborators panel. After their first log in, they will be added to the project automatically.
Inviting the entire organization only applies to users who have logged in at least once.
To learn more, see the 8.9.0-alpha3 release notes.
Connectors
Deprecated: Operate Connector
The Operate Connector is deprecated, following the deprecation of the Operate API in Camunda 8.9 (see Deprecated: Operate and Tasklist v1 REST APIs).
Going forward, you can use the Orchestration Cluster REST API via the REST Connector.
Virtual threads support
Camunda 8.9 provides support for virtual threads in the connector runtime. Virtual threads are enabled by default for outbound connectors.
See connector runtime performance for more information on optimizing connector performance with virtual threads.
To learn more, see the 8.9.0-alpha2 release notes.