A data mesh on minikube.
The capstone puts every building block from §1–§12 together into one coherent system: 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.
It's organized as its own set of pages with its own reading order — read straight through for the full build, or jump to the concept you came for.
The set
Read in order the first time. The conceptual pages (concepts, Kubernetes substrate) ground the implementation pages that follow; the anti-patterns page closes the set with the failure modes to watch for.
00 The data-mesh capstone — start here
The map — what the capstone builds, the reading order, and a link to each page in the set. Start here.
01 Concepts & principles
What a data mesh is, operational vs. analytical data, and Dehghani's four principles — the conceptual grounding before any commands.
02 Kubernetes as the substrate
Why Kubernetes is a natural substrate for a data mesh, and how the four principles map onto namespaces, operators, RBAC, and platform primitives.
03 Services & data products
The services, the order-service template, and the anatomy of a data product — its ports, its internal transformation, and the container image that ships it.
04 Contracts & the catalog
Versioned contracts in Apicurio and discovery plus lineage in OpenMetadata — and why a catalog is a mesh requirement, not an optional add-on.
05 The data planes
The async backbone of Kafka events and the read layer of GraphQL composing REST and gRPC — when to reach for each, and why the capstone uses all of them.
06 Progressive delivery & mTLS
Evolving a contract in the open with an Istio v1→v2 canary, and the decision to mesh selectively rather than enabling injection namespace-wide.
07 Elastic & resilient
Scaling to demand and to zero with KEDA, and the cloud-native recoverability the platform provides when things fail.
08 Observability
Seeing what the mesh is doing — metrics, distributed traces across products, and the live view of traffic between them.
09 Anti-patterns
The conceptual and organizational ways data-mesh efforts go wrong, drawn from the literature — so you can recognize them early.
Where this fits in the tutorial
This capstone is §17 of the main tutorial. The earlier sections introduced the building blocks individually — helm, Istio, KEDA, and the rest. The capstone is where they converge into a single running system, and the section that justifies the time invested in §1–§12.
One command brings the whole thing up on a dedicated
mof-capstone minikube profile; the host
prerequisites (including Docker Engine and the kernel
tweaks) are covered in
§1.