Accelerating Cloud Migration with Data Mesh Solution Patterns
Cloud Computing adoption is rapidly increasing in enterprises. Moving to the Cloud can provide greater flexibility, quicker time-to-market, reduced cost, and improved security and stability. However cloud adoption in the enterprise — in particular, migration of core applications and data — can be slow and fraught with challenges.
In a recent article Data Mesh Cloud Migration Patterns that I collaborated with Eric Broda on, we discussed how enterprises can adopt Data Mesh solution patterns such as Change Data Capture, Events Streaming, and Data Products Catalog to accelerate cloud migration. Eric Broda is a consultant who designs and implements Data Mesh solutions in financial services. Eric has written numerous Data Mesh articles, available at medium.com/@ericbroda.
The article introduces the notion of a data gravity well to describe a consistent pattern we’ve observed in our clients: applications and use-cases will be developed closer to where the data they need can be accessed. Each application exposing valuable data for consumption will naturally draw in additional use-cases and workload. Therefore, a central question you should consider to accelerate your cloud migration is how are you shifting your data gravity well to the cloud?
Figure 1. Establishing the Cloud Data Gravity Well (image credits: Eric Broda)
Unbundling on-premises enterprise applications for migration to the cloud is no simple feat. Instead of focusing purely on migrating applications, you can accelerate cloud adoption by unlocking the data produced by these applications and making them readily accessible and available on the cloud.
The Cloud Migration Data Mesh Solution Pattern achieves this by moving data in near real-time and unobtrusively from an enterprise transactional or analytical system to a secure cloud-native data product. This pattern creates a “live replica” of the original data and does not require application migrations. This offers several tangible and practical benefits:
- It is unobtrusive, requiring zero application changes, thereby alleviating the need to “untangle” the existing application and data spider web.
- Since no application changes are required, this pattern can be deployed very quickly.
- With simpler data migrations, this establishes a cloud “data gravity well” required to accelerate cloud migration.
- As a “live replica”, data is available on the cloud in near real-time providing timely, consistent, and accurate data to newer cloud-native tasks such as AI/ML and advanced analytics.
- With data available on cloud, new applications can be developed quicker and time to market can be dramatically reduced.
You can read more about this in the article: Data Mesh Cloud Migration Patterns. These technical solution patterns combined with the Data Mesh principles and operating model provide a powerful way to establish a gravity well on the cloud. We believe this can simultaneously accelerate cloud adoption as well as set-up the organization for future scale and agility.
It is worth noting that building a Data Mesh involves more than adopting technical patterns as it may also require a huge shift in how you think about data culture and data operating model. I have previously discussed cultural and organizational challenges you might encounter when adopting Data Mesh in 10 reasons you are not ready to adopt Data Mesh.
Hopefully this article gives you the necessary insight to kickstart your own Enterprise Data Mesh and accelerate your enterprise’s cloud adoption!
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The opinions expressed in this article are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of my clients or Google.
The opinions expressed in this article by Eric Broda are his alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of his clients.
