#119 Cautionary Learnings From a Startup Doing Data Mesh: Orfium's Journey to Decentralized Data Success - Interview w/ Argyris Argyrou and Konstantinos Siaterlis

Sign up for Data Mesh Understanding's free roundtable and introduction programs here: https://landing.datameshunderstanding.com/Please Rate and Review us on your podcast app of choice!If you want to be a guest or give feedback (suggestions for topics, comments, etc.), please see hereEpisode list and links to all available episode transcripts here.Provided as a free resource by Data Mesh Understanding / Scott Hirleman. Get in touch with Scott on LinkedIn if you want to chat data mesh.Transcript for this episode (link) provided by Starburst. See their Data Mesh Summit recordings here and their great data mesh resource center here.Argyris Argyrou's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/argyrisargyrou/Konstantinos "Kostas" Siaterlis' LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siaterliskonstantinos/In this episode, Scott interviewed Argyris Argyrou, Head of Data, and Konstantinos "Kostas" Siaterlis, Director of Big Data at Orfium. There is a ton of useful information on anti-patterns, what is going well now, advice, etc. in this one.From here forward in this write-up, A&K will refer to Argyris and Kostas rather than trying to specifically call out who said which part in most cases.Some key takeaways/thoughts from A&K's points of view:On a data mesh journey: "It's not a sprint, it's a marathon." Pace yourself. It's okay to go at your own pace, don't worry about what other people are doing with data mesh, do what's right for you.Really focusing on the why and showing people results was a far better driver to buy-in and participation than any amount of selling about data mesh as a practice. Calling it data mesh when trying to explain it to people outside the data team didn't go well either...Orfium's "Data Doctor" approach - a low friction and low pressure office hours for a general staff data engineer - has really helped people help with data challenges and in spreading good data practices but without the "Doctor" becoming a bottleneck.The Data Doctor's role is to answer questions and provide guidance but not do the work for people. Then, take what was discussed and the best practice and document it for others to learn from - providing good leverage for scaling best data practices.In a smaller company like Orfium (~250 people), it's hard to justify a lot of full-time heads to implement data mesh. And trying to treat a data mesh implementation like a side-project also creates issues. There isn't a great answer here on exactly what to do except possibly take things slower than most startups are used to. Your data will still be waiting for you a few months later.If you are having difficulty driving broad buy-in, showing people what data mesh can do in action...

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Interviews with data mesh practitioners, deep dives/how-tos, anti-patterns, panels, chats (not debates) with skeptics, "mesh musings", and so much more. Host Scott Hirleman (founder of the Data Mesh Learning Community) shares his learnings - and those of the broader data community - from over a year of deep diving into data mesh. Each episode contains a BLUF - bottom line, up front - so you can quickly absorb a few key takeaways and also decide if an episode will be useful to you - nothing worse than listening for 20+ minutes before figuring out if a podcast episode is going to be interesting and/or incremental ;) Hoping to provide quality transcripts in the future - if you want to help, please reach out! Data Mesh Radio is also looking for guests to share their experience with data mesh! Even if that experience is 'I am confused, let's chat about' some specific topic. Yes, that could be you! You can check out our guest and feedback FAQ, including how to submit your name to be a guest and how to submit feedback - including anonymously if you want - here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dDdb1mEhmcYqx3xYAvPuM1FZMuGiCszyY9x8X250KuQ/edit?usp=sharing Data Mesh Radio is committed to diversity and inclusion. This includes in our guests and guest hosts. If you are part of a minoritized group, please see this as an open invitation to being a guest, so please hit the link above. If you are looking for additional useful information on data mesh, we recommend the community resources from Data Mesh Learning. All are vendor independent. https://datameshlearning.com/community/ You should also follow Zhamak Dehghani (founder of the data mesh concept); she posts a lot of great things on LinkedIn and has a wonderful data mesh book through O'Reilly. Plus, she's just a nice person: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zhamak-dehghani/detail/recent-activity/shares/ Data Mesh Radio is provided as a free community resource by DataStax. If you need a database that is easy to scale - read: serverless - but also easy to develop for - many APIs including gRPC, REST, JSON, GraphQL, etc. all of which are OSS under the Stargate project - check out DataStax's AstraDB service :) Built on Apache Cassandra, AstraDB is very performant and oh yeah, is also multi-region/multi-cloud so you can focus on scaling your company, not your database. There's a free forever tier for poking around/home projects and you can also use code DAAP500 for a $500 free credit (apply under payment options): https://www.datastax.com/products/datastax-astra?utm_source=DataMeshRadio