Feature support in Business Automation Workflow on containers

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This topic only applies to BAW, and is located in the BAW repository. Last updated on 2025-03-13 12:15

The features and capabilities that are supported in the Workflow automation capability in IBM® Cloud Pak for Business Automation are also supported in Business Automation Workflow on containers.

Key supported capabilities in the container environment

You can use the following capabilities in the container environment:

Workflow automations (with or without cases)
Online and offline deployments from Business Automation Studio
Process Admin Console
REST operation APIs to automate administrative actions
Workplace and Process Portal
Workplace Assistant
Transactional service flows
Asynchronous service flows
Secure REST integrations
JSON schema imports
Exposure of workflow automations as Kafka services and cross-workflow triggering using Kafka
Exposure of workflow automations as IBM MQ services and cross‑workflow triggering using MQ
Invocation of watsonx Orchestrate AI agents from workflow automations
Workflow Runtime MCP server for exposing work-management tools
Model gateway to support multiple LLM providers
Ready-to-use application connector for Microsoft Exchange Email

The fundamentals of deploying onto the Workflow platform running on containers are the same as those for deploying an application onto a traditional environment. Load balancing, clustering, and high-availability disaster recovery (HADR) rely on Kubernetes. Infrastructure ops, including admin APIs and tuning, are different compared to what you might be familiar with in a traditional environment.

For a comparison of capabilities across deployment environments, see Deployment comparison.

What is not supported in the container environment

If you have existing applications in the traditional environment that you want to move to containers, these are the features that you must convert or remove.

Deprecated features and artifacts

Deprecated features are not supported in the container environment. This includes using the LiveConnect API to start Java™ from JavaScript. For a complete list of deprecated features, see Deprecated and removed features of IBM Business Automation Workflow.
Deprecated artifacts (except heritage human services) that are created in the desktop Process Designer are not supported in containers. Heritage coaches that are included in heritage human services are supported in the runtime only. For a detailed list, see Artifact support in traditional and container runtime environments.

What's different in containers

wsadmin commands are not supported but you can use the Operations REST APIs. Each API comes with a Swagger definition. See Operations REST APIs External link opens a new window or tab

The following capabilities are not supported due to architectural differences in Liberty:

Advanced applications that are created in IBM Integration Designer such as BPEL processes, mediation flows, and SCA applications
Performance Data Warehouse
Dynamic Event Framework (DEF) XML event emission
WebSphere® MQ and JMS integrations. However, you can expose capabilities of your workflow automations as IBM MQ services. See Creating an MQ service .
XML validation and transformation
IBM Business Automation Machine Learning Server, including Intelligent Task Prioritization and Workforce Insights

Business Automation Workflow on containers 26.0.0.0 does not support upgrading from previous Business Automation Workflow on containers releases.