Data mesh at Grab part I: Building trust through certification

Summary

Grab began its Signals Marketplace data mesh journey in 2024 because its expanding, varied data ecosystem had ownership gaps, duplicated pipelines, central Data Engineering bottlenecks, broken downstream dependencies, inconsistent definitions, and uneven practitioner expertise. The decentralised model treats data as a product owned by domain teams, with Business Data Owners and Technical Data Owners accountable for upkeep, documentation, usability, and SLOs. Certification formalises expectations through data contracts covering schema, freshness, completeness, retention, change notice, and communication, while automated Data Production Incidents flag breached reliability guarantees for investigation. Using the percentage of queries hitting certified assets as its north star metric, Grab reports 75% of queries targeting certified assets, a 400% year-over-year increase in deprecated tables, and a 58% reduction in P80 datasets.

Takeaways

1. 1

   Data contracts define schema, freshness, completeness, retention policies, change notice, and communication channels for certified data products.

2. 2

   Automated Data Production Incidents are assigned to Technical Data Owners when tests for availability, timeliness, consistency, completeness, accuracy, validity, or other guarantees fail.

3. 3

   Queries hitting certified assets reached 75%; deprecated tables increased 400% year over year, while the number of P80 datasets fell by over 58%.