Data Mesh: Innovative Concept or Unintended Copycat?
Data Mesh in a Nutshell Data Mesh reimagines data architecture by decentralizing data ownership and focusing on making data available as a product. Instead of centralizing all data into a monolithic organization and process, it distributes responsibility across data domains—teams or departments that treat their own data as a product and are accountable for its quality, accuracy, and availability. The Four Key Pillars of Data Mesh Domain-Oriented Data Ownership: Each domain (business unit or team) manages its own data, ensuring that the experts closest to the data are responsible for it, which fosters accountability and relevance. Data as a Product: Data is treated like a product, with clear documentation, APIs, and service-level agreements (SLAs) to ensure it is usable, discoverable, and reliable for consumers within and outside the domain. Self-Service Data Infrastructure: Data Mesh promotes self-service tools and platforms, empowering domains to easily publish, access, and consume data without heavy reliance on a central IT team, thus boosting agility and scalability. Federated Computational Governance: To maintain security, compliance, and quality across decentralized domains (data silos), Data Mesh implements federated governance—a set of policies, agreements, and standards enforced automatically through code (computational governance). This ensures consistency across the organization without compromising domain autonomy. Microservice Architecture: A Brief Overview Microservices are built around several key principles: ...