Appendix D. Data Mesh Architecture

Gives a brief overview of the data mesh paradigm

According tohttps://www.datamesh-architecture.com resource, data mesh architecture addresses shortcomings of data fabric, which is typically maintained by a central data team, which answers all the data related requests to the decision makers and becomes a bottleneck to do it in a timely manner.

Data mesh architecture, on the other hand, focuses on the concept of data products produced and maintained by the team where the data originates. This is typically a team of domain experts, who can produce high quality analytical data products.

The core principles of data mesh architecture are:

• Domain Ownership principle mandates the domain teams to take responsibility for their data. According to this principle, analytical data should be composed around domains, similar to the team boundaries aligning with the system’s bounded context. Following the domain-driven distributed architecture, analytical and operational data ownership is moved to the domain teams, away from the central data team.

• Data-as-a-Product principle projects a product thinking philosophy onto analytical data. This principle means that there are consumers for the data beyond the domain. The domain team is responsible for satisfying the needs of other domains by providing high-quality data. Basically, domain data should be treated as any other public API.

• Self-serve data infrastructure platform principle suggests to adopt platform thinking to data infrastructure. A dedicated data platform team provides domain-agnostic functionality, tools, and systems to build, execute, and maintain interoperable data products for all domains. With its platform, the data platform team enables domain teams to seamlessly consume and create data products.

• Federated Government principle achieves interoperability of all data products through standardization, which is promoted through the whole data mesh by the governance guild. The main goal of federated governance is to create a data ecosystem with adherence to the organizational rules and industry regulations.

It also says in the https://www.datamesh-architecture.com that data mesh has nothing to do with blockchain. May be not yet? 🙂

Please keep in mind that all these concepts come from the enterprise Web 2 world, but in the next chapters we explore how we can adapt them for Web 3.