Chapter 13. Data Mesh Foundation
A data mesh is a decentralized data architecture with four specific characteristics. First, it requires independent teams within desginated domains to own their analytical data. Second, in a data mesh, data is treated and served as a product to help the data consumer to discover, trust, and utilize it for whatever purpose they like. Third, it relies on automated infrastructure provisioning. And fourth, it uses governance to ensure that all the independent data products are secure and follow global rules.
Although the concepts that make up a data mesh are not new, Zhamak Dehghani, CEO and founder of Nextdata, deserves credit for coining the term data mesh and combining those concepts.1 Although others have formed various opinions about what a data mesh is, this book bases its definition on Dehghani’s work, in particular her four data mesh principles, which I discuss in this chapter. It is very important to understand that data mesh is a concept, not a technology. It is all about an organizational and cultural shift within companies. The technology used to build a data mesh could follow the modern data warehouse, data fabric, or data lakehouse architecture—or domains could even follow different architectures.
As we delve into the nuanced world of data mesh architectures in this chapter and the next, I offer a road map to navigate the complex data mesh landscape grounded in the principle of decentralization. In this chapter, I dissect the decentralized ...
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