Data Mesh Newsletter - #01

Exciting content and upcoming events from the world of data mesh

Welcome to the inaugural edition of the Data Mesh Learning (DML) Newsletter. You can say you were here from the start 😎 We plan to send it every other week - that was what was the overwhelming winner in our Slack poll. Forward it to your friends to show how ahead of the curve you are 😉

You are getting this email as you signed up for our Slack channel.

The bi-weekly newsletter will include links to content (usually with analysis of said content), upcoming events, info about the community, and interactive pieces like our question-of-the-week.

Our Substack blog/newsletter will also have content outside the newsletter like our very short intro to data mesh if you can’t wait a full fortnight for the next newsletter.

If you have content or events you think should be included, please message Scott Hirleman in Slack or email us: community@datameshlearning.com.

Let’s jump in.

Question of the Week:

Here is an explanation of our Question of the Week project. We want to have a question we discuss on Reddit (r/datamesh) so we have an easier way to do long-form responses than Slack and allow better cross time-zone collaboration/communication.

Our first question this week is: What are your biggest questions about data mesh? Basically what should our future questions of the week be? Answer here 😀

Recent Content:

Okay, But Just WTF is a Data Mesh?!
by DML (yay, our first article); article

A very short intro to data mesh that you can send to people who are wondering what data mesh is all about.

Decentralizing Data: From Data Monolith to Data Mesh
by Barry O’Reilly with guest Zhamak Dehghani; podcast - 56min, no transcript available

This is a great conversation whether you are new to data mesh or a grizzled veteran. They cover some of the same ground as previous Zhamak presentations but dig into a lot of the nuances why Zhamak made the choices she did and also how to get started with actual data mesh deployment (see starting at ~34:30).

Data mesh user journey stories
by DML on r/datamesh; mostly articles but some videos or presentation decks

A collection of user journey stories from 10 companies who have shared publicly what they are doing with data mesh: Intuit, JPMC, DPG Media, Gloo, Autozone, Zalando, Yotpo, HSBC, UC San Diego, and ABN AMRO.

Delivery Hero’s Data Mesh
by Mathias Nitzsche at Delivery Hero; video - 19min

Hosted by GCP so expect some selling GCP but overall, a very informative presentation about Delivery Hero moving some of their teams/domains to data mesh and their future plans to move more; the below figure has metrics about their data mesh deployment to-date (see ~16 data products per business unit which is an interesting metric).

The Data Lake is dead - Long Live Data Mesh
by Data Leadrs interviewing Jon Cooke; video - 28min

Jon does a great job of explaining a lot of the common pain people experience with typical data lake deployments; especially long time-to-deploy of data analysis and even dashboards and how data mesh can significantly speed up those deployments. Overall, a good intro to data mesh and why data mesh exists as well as what are some lingering questions people are asking (including in the Slack).

Towards a Data Mesh (part 1) : Data Domains and Teams Topologies
by François Nguyen; article

Applying the concepts of Team Topologies (which is mentioned very frequently in our Slack) to data mesh for a streamlined organization design with your domain teams, a platform team, and an enabling team of technical domain (so not your data mesh domain) experts.

How banks can achieve the promise of open banking with a data mesh architecture
by Mohammad Syed of Credera; article

Two interesting nuances from this article we hadn’t seen before were:
1) data mesh = governance decisions are part of initial data product design instead of seen as a blocker later
2) see the figure below; the concept of testing your data and analytics delivery as you migrate to data mesh is interesting as you can prove out value from a data mesh approach very quickly

Community Updates:

Please read our community update post: Slack Update + Topic Swarms + Reddit Forums

Data Mesh Learning website to launch soon - we are moving away from the microsite to a full-fledged site. Launch is April 7, 2021. Don’t recommend poking at it yet, it’s not ready and lots of pages are still private 😅

Upcoming Webinars and Training:

Zhamak and/or other ThoughtWorks colleagues are doing 4 upcoming webinars:

Data as a product with Zhamak on April 8; morning for North America, evening for Europe

How the heck do you build a Data Mesh? with Zhamak and Cinchy (a data fabric vendor) on April 9; noon/morning for North America, evening for Europe

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)

Data Mesh in Practice; Max Schultze of Zalando at the datatalks.club meetup on April 13; late for Europe and early to mid-day for North America (tickets are free)

/Newsletter

If you have questions/comments/concerns/suggestions for future newsletters, please let us know at community@datameshlearning.com; we’d love feedback on how people want times displayed for upcoming events especially.

Special thanks to DataStax for allowing me to focus on this community and hopefully helping you all learn more about data mesh 😅