Data Mesh Newsletter #08
The high level:
1) Meetup cadence is officially weekly!
JPMorgan Chase’s CIO, Chief Architect, and Head of Cloud (Data) will present this Thursday (Jul 8 at 7pm EDT / 4pm PDT / 8am AEST).
MANY more meetups coming. If you want to present, we currently have openings in September and October.
2) Needed (PLEASE!): a slide on one of your data products. Why? Our July 15th meetup will cover the anatomy of data products and we need examples. More info here.
3) Our little community isn’t so little anymore. 3K+ people! If you want to help out, new channel in the Slack just for driving the community. We absolutely need help, this can’t maintain momentum from mostly one person driving things. (Yes, read this as a call to action)
4) Scott put together a guide for getting started on your data mesh journey here. Very much version 0.1, need feedback and collaborators (and editors…) to drive it to something truly useful but it’s a start!
5) Vendors exist and matter in data mesh. Let us know how you want to hear from vendors. Scheduled “Tool Talks” on days other than our meetups? Recorded interviews? Etc. Best place to discuss is in the Slack.
6) Local data mesh communities are starting to bubble up. That’s AWESOME! François Nguyen is leading the French community and Winfried Etzel is looking to start the Norwegian community. If other people want to start local communities, let us know.
Community Request - Be The Change
As noted, the community continues to gain momentum. We need to start forming a broader group of people driving the community. Scott driving most things is not a good long-term answer…
Yes, most people in the Slack and on this newsletter are just trying to absorb info - and that is great! We love you all. But we need leaders and we need more participation giving people an idea of what to do when getting started w/ data mesh (e.g. we need people to start posting sample notebooks of their data products w/ dummy data and/or open sourcing their data APIs). We need to normalize sharing information more and extracting useful information from each other to share.
If you want to be part of driving the community, join the #community-steering room. If you want data mesh to be the inevitable force it can be, making the lives of people in the data/engineering worlds better through an empathy-driven culture that also drives awesome results, be the change you want to see.
Interesting Data Mesh Related Content
How to get started with data mesh (v0.1)
by Scott Hirleman (of DML); long Substack post
Very much a rough cut but an initial attempt at a guide re how to actually get moving on your data mesh journey. Based on the conversations in the Slack and many 1:1s with people implementing data mesh and/or trying to figure out how to start. The goal is to give you permission to get moving and also start discussing MVx or the minimum viable “x” across many topics to start your data mesh journey in earnest. Feedback VERY welcome (and necessary).
Data Mesh at HelloFresh - A Work in Progress - a Data Mesh Learning Meetup
by Christoph Sawade, Hariprasad Natarajan, Mario Konschake, Surya Emmylinda, Sharif Abdel-Halim, Pedro Castillo, and Natalie Hallak; video (79min)
A fantastic presentation by 7(!) senior members of the HelloFresh team. They covered a wide range of topics about their data mesh journey to-date and what they learned along the way including: data modelling challenges; how a self-serve data platform can enable domain teams; an example of a data product; how to foster a data product mindset; and how HelloFresh is driving data literacy internally.
POV: A streaming/communication platform for the data mesh
by Olivier Wulveryck (Octo, Consulting Co); Blog Post
Olivier builds a (somewhat simplistic) model of a data platform-level communication underlay in a data mesh. The goal is to show how you could build the tooling to easily enable data to flow from one data product (node on the mesh) to another without domain teams building pipelines. Includes some code examples as well.
A Data Mesh Panel Discussion with Zhamak Dehghani, Barr Moses, and Lena Hall
by Lena Hall (recorded by DML); audio-only YouTube video (60min)
A great panel discussion with Zhamak and Barr, hosted and organized by Lena Hall (thanks Lena!). They covered a number of topics across data mesh and data observability including common challenges/pain points/points of confusion re data mesh.
The Data Mesh: How We Will Finally Unleash the Promised Value of Data in the Enterprise
by Seb Bulpin; LinkedIn Blog Post
A great summation of the potential promise of data mesh to solve the scaling challenges big data caused. While there is nothing really new here, the flow and style could be great for driving buy-in for data mesh from skeptics.
Domain-Driven Design: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About it, But Were Afraid to Ask
by Pablo Martinez (SSense); Medium Post
A very good post on the nuts and bolts of Domain Driven Design. The focus is on the operational plane but it quite applicable to DDD for data. (h/t to François Nguyen for the recommendation)
Kolibri Games’ Data Mesh Journey and Measuring Data Mesh ROI - a Data Mesh Learning Meetup
by António Fitas (Kolibri Games), Barr Moses (Monte Carlo), and Scott O’Leary (Monte Carlo); video (81min)
A really interesting meetup. António gave a history of Kolibri Games' journey with data from inception until now as they have begun implementing data mesh. For every year, he talked about the evolution of teams on the data/engineering side as well as the pain points of their setup at that point. Barr and Scott covered how to evaluate whether data mesh is right for you and how to measure the return on investment of data mesh.
Upcoming Meetups / Zhamak Stuff
DML Meetups (6:30pm CEST / 12:30pm EDT / 9:30am PDT / 10pm IST unless noted):
Jul 8: CIO, Chief Architect, and the Head of Cloud (Data) from JPMorgan Chase will present on their data mesh journey to date. James “JR” Reid previously presented about their journey in January and it was phenomenal. At 7pm EDT / 4pm PDT / 8am Fri AEST
Jul 15: Anatomy of a Data Product - Goal is to cover some examples of data products and generally have a discussion for those confused about data product scope and needs. And yes, data UX (aka DUX) will mean there may be duck puns… w/ Scott Hirleman, Mohammad Syed, and ? (maybe you? Ping Scott if interested)
Jul 22: Data Product Versioning - An Overview w/ OSS Projects lakeFS and TerminusDB - Paul Singman 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.
Jul 29: 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.
Aug 5: Data Mesh at Saxo Bank (4pm CEST / 7:30pm IST / 10am EDT / 7am PDT)
Aug 12: Data Mesh at Delhivery (5:30pm CEST / 9pm IST / 11:30am EDT / 8:30am PDT)
Aug 19: Scheduled but To Be Announced
Aug 26: Data Mesh at Flexport
September and October speaking slots open! Contact Scott if you want to share your journey!
Other Data Mesh Meetups/Webinars/Training
Non-DML Meetup: Jul 8 at 6pm CEST / noon EDT / 9am PDT / 9:30pm IST
Exploring Data Products in the domain with Sheetal Pratik of Saxo Bank
Zhamak webinar with ThoughtWorks: “Data Mesh: What, Why, and How”; Jul 15 at 5:30pm CEST / 11:30am EDT / 8:30am PDT (yes, right before our meetup)
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
The last training was phenomenally helpful, especially re deriving domains.
/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 😅