Data Mesh Newsletter #02

Exciting content and upcoming events from the world of data mesh

The Data Mesh Learning website is live. Check out lots of great compiled content to get you up to speed or dive deeper into topics. If you have suggestions, let us hear it! If you need a chuckle, this is our favorite data mesh meme to-date.

We’ve also secured free tickets/discounts to two conferences with Zhamak speaking (+ other data mesh content) for you - see bottom section.

DML Question of the Week:

What size should a data product be? Share your thoughts at the link on Reddit (r/datamesh).

Recent Content:

Data as a product
by Zhamak Dehghani; webinar (60min)

Great webinar about how to approach data products and data product thinking. If you are considering data mesh, this one is an absolute must watch. There is a LOT of information so we recommend taking notes as well.
You can also see a rough chat transcript here; the chat was actually useful per many attendees

Two steps towards a modern data platform
by Gerben Oostra of BigData Republic (consulting firm); article

One of the first articles to provide concrete steps on moving towards data mesh: you need to deploy something as your initial data platform before it is perfect (see below) and then evolve your data platform as you put more data products on it. Recommendations are in-line with the first steps as recommended by Zhamak in her podcast conversation with Barry O’Reilly (starts min 34). We strongly recommend reading the entire article.

Toward a Data Mesh (part 2) : Architecture & Technologies
by François Nguyen; article

Interesting article that lays out a basic architectural approach to data mesh. Not sure we agree with all the points, especially in the early stages of data mesh deployment, but thought provoking at the least and worth a read.

Data Mesh: The Answer to the Data Warehouse Hypocrisy
by Daniel Abadi (on Starburst Data blog); article

Some very good points about how separation of workloads but with serialized needs in compute leads to bad scalability; and that is essentially how analytics has been split in terms of people with separate teams focused on 1) ingestion, 2) transformation and cleaning, and 3) data modeling and serving. Data mesh allows for mass parallelization of your teams, leading to better scalability. - While it on a vendor blog, is low on selling

How the heck do you build a Data Mesh?
by Dan DeMers (Cinchy - vendor) with Zhamak Dehghani; webinar (42min)

Not salesy and there are some fascinating/illuminating tidbits. At min 15, Zhamak discusses expansion of a data product - rather than creating an entirely new data product - as new useful analysis is created. Starting at min 28, Zhamak answers Q&A re 1) how data mesh approaches MDM; 2) chicken and egg of setting up domains versus creating a data product (she argues domains first); 3) does reusable downstream analysis lead to a new data product (it depends on if it cross-domain and other factors); and many more.

We are also starting a new series of detailed read-throughs of historical content. See our first post re the post Data Mesh Applied here.

Call for Content / Speakers:

Starting the week of April 26, we will begin data mesh fireside chats, panels, and AMAs (ask-me-anythings). The first set will cover data products, mostly with data product owners or data mesh deployment leaders.

We also have a number of friendly adjacent communities that are looking for speakers. We have a channel called #speaking-opportunities but if you want to speak about data mesh, please contact Scott Hirleman in the Slack or email community@datameshlearning.com. If you are looking for speakers, do the same 😁

Upcoming Webinars and Training:

Zhamak and/or other ThoughtWorks colleagues are doing 2 upcoming webinars:

Unlocking Data Value in the Enterprise with Arif Wider and Emily Gorcenski on April 15; late morning for Europe, evening for APAC

Guiding the evolution of data mesh with fitness functions with Zhamak and David Colls on April 19/20; late morning Australia, late evening North America

There are also 2 upcoming training sessions, one by Zhamak and one by Max Schultze of Zalando + Arif Wider of ThoughtWorks:

Zhamak training with DDD Europe (special 10% discount code for DML); May 3, 4, 10, 11; 4hr sessions, late for Europe and early to mid-day for North America; price is €1,755 with our discount

Max + Arif training with O’Reilly; April 26; 3hr session late for Europe and early to mid-day for North America; price is free with O’Reilly Learning Subscription ($499/yr or $49/mo)

Related Conference Free Tickets and Discounts*: 

The Knowledge Graph Conference (KGC) has graciously provided us with a 20% discount code for their conference (May 3-6; code is KGCLovesZhamak!) -> Discounted costs: $140 for presentation track or $240 for full track including workshops/tutorials
Zhamak will keynote; there will be a 3hr data mesh tutorial; and Accenture will present on data mesh
The KGC folks will also be giving away a free ticket each week in the Slack, see here for more info.

QCon Plus Software Conference (May 17-28) has graciously provided us with three free tickets (enter raffle here by end of April 16th) and a 10% discount code for the first 25 signups using our code (code is DATAMESHQPLUSMAY) -> Discounted cost of $495 before May 1.
The conference has a data mesh track and Zhamak’s talk is called “An Architectural Deep Dive” which we haven’t seen her present about to-date.

/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 😅

*We do not accept payment from partners and are not accepting sponsors. Our requirement from potential partners is a discount code and/or ticket giveaway to our members.