In principle, data mesh architecture should liberate teams to build their systems and gather data in a distributed way, without having to explicitly coordinate. Data is the thing that can and should decouple teams, but proper implementation has its challenges.
In this episode, Kris talks to Florian Albrecht (Solution Architect, Hermes Germany) about Galapagos, an open-source DevOps software tool for Apache Kafka® that Albrecht created with his team at Hermes, a German parcel delivery company.
After Hermes chose Kafka to implement company-wide event-driven architecture, Albrecht’s team created rules and guidelines on how to use and really make the most out of Kafka. But the hands-off approach wasn’t leading to greater independence, so Albrecht’s team tried something different to documentation— they encoded the rules as software.
This method pushed the teams to stop thinking in terms of data and to start thinking in terms of events. Previously, applications copied data from one point to another, with slight changes each time. In the end, teams with conflicting data were left asking when the data changed and why, with a real impact on customers who might be left wondering when their parcel was redirected and how. Every application would then have to be checked to find out when exactly the data was changed. Event architecture terminates this cycle.
Events are immutable and changes are registered as new domain-specific events. Packaged together as event envelopes, they can be safely copied to other applications, and can provide significant insights. No need to check each application to find out when manually entered or imported data was changed—the complete history exists in the event envelope. More importantly, no more time-consuming collaborations where teams help each other to interpret the data.
Using Galapagos helped the teams at Hermes to switch their thought process from raw data to event-driven. Galapagos also empowers business teams to take charge of their own data needs by providing a protective buffer. When specific teams, providers of data or events, want to change something, Galapagos enforces a method which will not kill the production applications already reading the data. Teams can add new fields which existing applications can ignore, but a previously required field that an application could be relying on won’t be changeable.
Business partners using Galapagos found they were better prepared to give answers to their developer colleagues, allowing different parts of the business to communicate in ways they hadn’t before. Through Galapagos, Hermes saw better success decoupling teams.
EPISODE LINKS
From Monolith to Microservices with Sam Newman
Exploring Event Streaming Use Cases with µKanren ft. Tim Baldridge
Introducing JSON and Protobuf Support ft. David Araujo and Tushar Thole
Scaling Apache Kafka in Retail with Microservices ft. Matt Simpson from Boden
Connecting Snowflake and Apache Kafka ft. Isaac Kunen
AMA with Tim Berglund | Streaming Audio Special
Kubernetes Meets Apache Kafka ft. Kelsey Hightower
Apache Kafka Fundamentals: The Concept of Streams and Tables ft. Michael Noll
IoT Integration and Real-Time Data Correlation with Kafka Connect and Kafka Streams ft. Kai Waehner
Confluent Platform 5.5 | What's New in This Release + Updates
Making Abstract Algebra Count in the World of Event Streaming ft. Sam Ritchie
Apache Kafka 2.5 – Overview of Latest Features, Updates, and KIPs
Streaming Data Integration – Where Development Meets Deployment ft. James Urquhart
How to Run Kafka Streams on Kubernetes ft. Viktor Gamov
Cloud Marketplace Considerations with Dan Rosanova
Explore, Expand, and Extract with 3X Thinking ft. Kent Beck
Ask Confluent #17: The “What is Apache Kafka?” Episode ft. Tim Berglund
Domain-Driven Design and Apache Kafka with Paul Rayner
Machine Learning with TensorFlow and Apache Kafka ft. Chris Mattmann
Distributed Systems Engineering with Apache Kafka ft. Gwen Shapira
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
Insight Story: Tech Trends Unpacked
Zero-Shot
Fast Forward by Tomorrow Unlocked: Tech past, tech future
The Unbelivable Truth - Series 1 - 26 including specials and pilot
Acquired