A Data Mesh Is The New Octopus Garden

A fascinating fact about the octopus - they create these elaborate, ocean floor dens with shells and shiny treasures they find along the way. All of these pieces – bottle caps, coconuts, shells, rocks, coral, pieces of shipwrecks – are collectively known as an Octopus’s Garden. I believe some young lads from Liverpool might have talked about it once.

The interesting part is that although these little garden cities sound like a magical Octlantis, Octopus are a hell of a lot more than interior decorators. They use the shells as tools for gathering food or as a door to thwart intruders, they use them as support structures to give their dens strength and rigidity, and they’re used as landmarks - all kinds of utilitarian brilliance out of different pieces.

In a previous post, we touched a little on the similarities between the octopus and Macrometa. For one, there’s no single point of failure. The octopus in its profound design has multiple hearts, a brain in each arm that acts independent of the others. It’s a beautifully crafted, natural redundancy that we felt drawn to. Macrometa, after all, has a decentralized architecture that makes us, like this humble cephalopod, both highly fault tolerant and resilient. 

It also reminded me of the ecosystem we’re building with our partnership community. The way Macrometa plays well with other tools. From an architectural standpoint, I think about the Global Data Mesh and the ability to filter in data from all of these little pieces everywhere. Every data source, every event, every PoP, every API - are all important pieces of the octopus garden. This foundation provides tools for developers to remedy their previously unsolvable problems with low latency at the edge.

[This isn’t an endorsement for intelligent design, not in the slightest, but isn’t it amazing how these parallels are all designed so intelligently]

The Macrometa Global Data Network (GDN) is a full-stack edge platform for building and running applications at the Edge. The GDN “garden” consists of a Global Data Mesh, Edge Compute, and Data Protection.

Global Data Mesh: Real-time, geo-distributed storage layer

Historically, database management and storage has been the bane of IT. As the ocean of data ebbs and flows in all directions, developers and enterprises and everyone that relies on data for decisions need a simplified way to quickly address different types of data. The Global Data Mesh has all the benefits of a NoSQL database with KV, doc, and graph stores – but the garden is even richer than that. 

Edge Compute: Run real-time apps close to your customers

Macrometa’s Edge Compute puts data into action and delivers real-time and event-driven apps and data globally in <10ms.* The shiniest tools in this garden are Query Workers and Stream Workers. Query Workers let developers create simple REST APIs on top of the data mesh. Stream Workers enables Complex Event Processing functions and Stream Processing workloads - in minutes instead of days or months.

Customers tell us that the combination of tables and streams integrated within Macrometa and the ability to use Stream Workers to process data live is “the Holy Grail” for app development. Try this simple tutorial.

Data Protection: More control over data

Organizations need to comply with regulatory and legal compliance standards. Macrometa’s Data Protection supports geo-pinning or geo-fencing to address data sovereignty use cases. Developers and operations can easily set up localized data fabrics for regional and global data, and adjust locations with just a toggle.

Macrometa is SOC 2 certified and offers user, token-based, and API keys authentication. It encompasses privacy, security, governance – the healthy tenets of a “security garden” I suppose. Hmm, maybe we should’ve called it a security garden. 🤔

Leverage a community of resources

Interestingly, the octopuses that create the gardens are considered “ecosystem engineers.” They’re called this because they create and transform their environments, improving resource availability for everyone in the community. At Macrometa we team up with partners to give our developers flexibility and speed. The Global Data Mesh connects data so that it can be stored, accessed, and processed at lightning speed, regardless of where it lives. We chose a mascot that was already doing the things we aspired to do.

Our goal is to give developers the freedom to build and run applications anywhere. We can work within their existing platforms like Linode, Akamai, Fastly, and even get their applications over that “last mile” with partners like Cox Edge with just a simple service API. Once you’ve built an impossible app, do Feature Flags in real-time thanks to our recent DevCycle partnership launching the world’s first and fastest Feature-Flag-as-a-service (from the Edge). 

Start your own Macrometa garden

As a company, we’ve prided ourselves on working well with others, and in the process we’ve created many gardens. The point is that they make things stronger, they add resilience, and we continue to explore new ways of seamlessly integrating the “shells” and “shiny objects” that make up the development landscape.

Create your own octopus garden and build the next impossible app. Request a 30 day trial, or schedule a demo with our experts.

We look forward to making some exciting announcements in the next few weeks and would love for you to build with us.

*<10ms for 80% of the global population

Photo by Serena Repice Lentini on Unsplash