Data Mesh Newsletter #07
The early release of Zhamak’s data mesh book is here thanks to Starburst*; we will be starting a reading club for this and other important books/articles in the near future 🤩 see the #reading-nook channel in the Slack. Again, go here to get the early release of Zhamak’s data mesh book.
Too long; didn’t skim (still long because lots of news and awesome new initiatives)
1) Great post on data mesh as a concept aimed at those familiar with microservices
2) Another great post, this one by Adevinta on their data mesh journey and principles
3) Big updates from DML:
a) We are doing (very much free) data mesh journey reviews - ~30min sanity checks/counseling sessions 🤣😅 useful content/contacts for you as target outcome
b) We are launching office hours on Tuesdays; more info here
4) Meetups in the near future (all times 6:30pm CEST / 12:30pm EDT unless noted):
Data Mesh at HelloFresh on June 24th
Zhamak, Barr Moses and Lena Hall Twitter Spaces conversation on data mesh on June 30th (6pm EDT / 3pm PDT / 8am AEST)
Data Mesh at Kolibri Games + Barr Moses on July 1st
Anatomy of a Data Product in Data Mesh on July 15th
Data Product Versioning (w/ OSS TerminusDB and lakeFS) on July 22nd
Data Mesh at CMC Markets on July 29th
5) Zhamak very often refers to data products as an architectural quantum; if you want a definition, you can find the chapter covering it here from the book Building Evolutionary Architectures
6) Seeing data mesh posts in more and more languages; the first one we’ve seen in Japanese 😎 Data mesh interest in Brazil is VERY high as well - more to come there soon.
7) A conceptual question (no answer, just question) from us here: what access control model should we use for data mesh (RBAC, ABAC, PBAC, BABYBAC?) - look for a meetup in August or September covering this question
8) 15% discount on Zhamak-led data mesh training in Sept. We highly recommend 😄
Data Mesh-Related Content
Data Mesh - Delivering Data-Driven Value at Scale (Early Release)
by Zhamak Dehghani; book (early release)
If you missed it above, ZHAMAK’S BOOK IS HERE! 🎆🌠🌟 It is an O’Reilly early release so we get a few unedited chapters now and (we believe) more chapters come every month or two until the 4Q release (O’Reilly needs to put up a page somewhere explaining the early release program…).
Building a data mesh to support an ecosystem of data products at Adevinta
by Xavier Gumara Rigol and Sandra Real; Medium post
Overall, a great read; Adevinta’s evolution/approach includes the below figure re every data product - we highly recommend to make sampling a data product that much easier on data product consumers. Adevinta also has an interesting approach on DDD with “core data sets” being data sets that are crucial and do not necessarily belong to one domain owned by the analytics team - Adevinta started by focusing on creating data products for core data first before domain data products.
What the Heck is a Data Mesh?!
by Chris Riccomini, WePay; blog post
A good overview for skeptics of data mesh that covers some important topics and how data mesh relates to microservices. Chris recommends starting with data as a product and then the other pieces of data mesh are logical outflows of doing that. This post inspired this article in CDO trends by Paul Mah: Understanding the Data Mesh.
Building Data Platforms II — The Age of the plumber is over
by João Vazao Vasques (Unbabel); Medium post
Follow-up to a post we included in the last newsletter. Makes strong arguments that distributed data ownership is the most logical approach to scaling data teams. Also pushes to move data engineers away from ETL pipelines to significantly higher value-add activities around prepping data for consumption re quality, security, discoverability, etc.
X-BAC - The Role of Access Control in Data Mesh
by Data Mesh Learning (us!); blog post
Very short post basically asking what is the right access control model re data governance for data mesh. No real answers, just something we think needs to be discussed more in-depth. RBAC seems to fall short but is the standard. ABAC and PBAC both seem interesting but still not perfect. We plan to have a meetup discussing the concepts in August or September.
Upcoming Data Mesh-Related Events
Zhamak-Led Training** (4 days, 4hrs each day, Sept 20, 21, 27, 28); 15% discount link makes it 1,657.50 Euro (we don’t understand VAT) - early bird pricing ends July 15th
We attended the last training and it was phenomenally helpful, especially re deriving domains.
Meetups
Data Mesh at HelloFresh - A work in progress - 7 senior members of the HelloFresh team will talk about their data mesh journey and how they are tackling some of data mesh’s biggest challenges (data literacy, data modeling, data products, etc.). Q&A afterwards.
June 24th at 6:30pm CEST / 12:30pm EDT / 9:30am PDT
Kolibri Games’ Data Mesh Journey & Calculating Data Mesh ROI with Barr Moses - António Fitas of Kolibri Games will share their data mesh journey so far including some pitfalls they have faced along the way. Barr Moses and Scott O’Leary of Monte Carlo will cover calculating the ROI of data mesh and whether data mesh is even right for your organization. Q&A afterwards.
July 1st at 6:30pm CEST / 12:30pm EDT / 9:30am PDT
(Non DML event) Data Mesh Panel Discussion with Zhamak Dehghani and Barr Moses - Lena Hall (Microsoft) will be hosting a Twitter spaces panel discussion with Zhamak and Barr. Anyone can listen in either through web or the Twitter app - the link will be available on any of their Twitter pages.
June 30th at 6pm EDT / 3pm PDT / Jul 1st 8am AEST
Anatomy of a Data Product in Data Mesh - We (Data Mesh Learning) will be covering the broad strokes definition of a data product and some tidbits about what data products look like across a number of data mesh implementations. If you want to submit content (1-3min video overview) or be part of the presentation, contact Scott in the Slack. Q&A afterwards.
July 15th at 6:30pm CEST / 12:30pm EDT / 9:30am PDT
Data Product Versioning - An Overview w/ OSS Projects lakeFS and TerminusDB - Einatt Orr of Treeverse (lakeFS) will cover data product versioning from a data + code standpoint relative to data mesh. Gavin Medel-Gleason of TerminusDB will cover data product schema versioning and what that means in data mesh. More detail to come. Q&A afterwards.
July 22nd at 6:30pm CEST / 12:30pm EDT / 9:30am PDT
Data Mesh at CMC Markets - Principal Core Data Engineers Tareq Abedrabbo and Lorenzo Nicora (plus potentially more colleagues) will cover CMC Markets’ journey with data mesh so far. They are somewhat unique in that they were already decentralized but were facing issues with data siloes. They have great insights across topics including driving buy-in. More detail to come. Q&A afterwards.
Data Mesh Learning Community Initiatives
Data Mesh Reviews
Data Mesh Learning is launching (absolutely free) data mesh reviews, ~30min chats with Scott. The goal is to chat about where you are with data mesh, what you are trying to accomplish, where you are running into challenges, etc.
What you get out of it: hopefully a sympathetic ear 👂 and links to useful content (possibly contacts) re the challenges you are facing.
What we get out of it: more information about common challenges so we can look to create content addressing those challenges
Check out the post linked above or grab time with Scott directly here
Data Mesh Community Office Hours
We are launching weekly community office hours starting next Tuesday, June 29 (Wednesday for Australia/New Zealand). We will have two separate hour-long time frames, one for Europe + East Coast US/Canada and South America (3pm CEST / 10am Brazil time / 9am EDT) and one for West Coast US/Canada/Central America + Australia/New Zealand (3:30pm PDT / 8:30am AEST). Links and office hour agendas can be found in the linked post above. We will be providing more info in the Slack.
*Starburst is not a sponsor of Data Mesh Learning or this newsletter. They graciously have made Zhamak’s book free (behind a contact info gate 😅) to all who would like it. As always, Data Mesh Learning is committed to remaining vendor-independent and any sponsorships, monetary or otherwise, will be aggressively noted 😉
**same as above for DDD Europe, which is hosting Zhamak’s training; Zhamak does amazing training so we want to promote it and secured a discount for the group.
/Newsletter
If you have questions/comments/concerns/suggestions for future newsletters, please let us know at community@datameshlearning.com.
Special thanks to DataStax for allowing me to focus on this community and hopefully helping you all learn more about data mesh 😅