Data Mesh

Chapter 1. Data Mesh in a Nutshell

“Think in simples” as my old master used to say—meaning to reduce the whole to its parts in simplest terms, getting back to first principles.

Frank Lloyd Wright

Data mesh is a decentralized sociotechnical approach to share, access, and manage analytical data in complex and large-scale environments—within or across organizations.

Data mesh is a new approach in sourcing, managing, and accessing data for analytical use cases at scale. Let’s call this class of data analytical data. Analytical data is used for predictive or diagnostic use cases. It is the foundation for visualizations and reports that provide insights into business. It is used to train machine learning models that augment business with data-driven intelligence. It is the essential ingredient for organizations to move from intuition and gut-driven decision making to taking actions based on observations and data-driven predictions. Analytical data is what powers the software and technology of the future. It enables a technology shift from human-designed rule-based algorithms to data-driven machine-learned models. Analytical data is becoming an increasingly critical component of the technology landscape.

Note

The term data in this book, if not qualified, refers to analytical data. Analytical data serves reporting and machine learning training use cases.

The Outcomes

To get value from data at scale in complex and large-scale organizations, data mesh sets to achieve these outcomes: ...