A data mesh, on Quarkus.
A working data-mesh reference: a domain of services modeling order-placement-through-shipment, each owning its data, its API surface, and its operational lifecycle, communicating through a deliberate mix of REST, gRPC, GraphQL, and Kafka — backed by Camel-on-Quarkus routes and langchain4j/MCP tooling, with contracts, a catalog, progressive delivery, autoscaling, and full observability.
It rebuilds the Python data-mesh reference as a running Quarkus system — demonstrating data-mesh patterns and Quarkus capabilities side by side, with one runnable Spring Boot twin service for a side-by-side comparison.
The set
Read in order the first time, part by part — each part groups the chapters covering one stage of the build.
Foundations
The landscape, the four principles, and why Kubernetes is the substrate this build runs on — the grounding before any service code.
Building data products
How a Quarkus service becomes a self-describing data product — its REST/gRPC surface, its versioned contract, and the planes it moves data across.
Operating the mesh
Running a data mesh day to day: progressive delivery and mTLS over Istio, scaling to demand and to zero with KEDA, and the observability to see all of it working.
Lessons & close
Where data-mesh efforts fail, and a closing tour of the four principles against what this project built.
The Quarkus deep-dive
What Quarkus provides: the extensions, the dev loop, startup options, and the two orchestration engines this project runs alongside Kafka choreography.
Appendices
Seven optional deep-dives: WebSockets.Next at scale, gotchas, agentic development notes, testing in depth, in-memory messaging versus Kafka, the three orchestration engines compared, and running on OpenShift Local.
What you'll need to run it
JDK 25, Maven 3.9.x, and Docker Engine for the local infrastructure — Kafka, Postgres, and the observability stack. See setup & prerequisites for the full toolchain, including the Quarkus CLI and SDKMAN.
The runnable example tree lives under examples/ in the repo, alongside the demo scripts and the presentation deck.
Demos & examples
Run the reference end to end, then exercise each data-mesh principle and Quarkus capability from a terminal — including the Spring Boot side-by-side comparison.