Data Mesh

Chapter 11. Design a Data Product by Affordances

The misconception which has haunted philosophic literature throughout the centuries is the notion of “independent existence.” There is no such mode of existence; every entity is to be understood in terms of the way it is interwoven with the rest of the universe.

Alfred North Whitehead

The design of the data product as an architecture quantum (“Data Product as an Architecture Quantum”) is arguably the most important aspect of the data mesh architecture. It is an element of architecture that is unique to data mesh. It builds upon prior approaches and learnings and yet departs from them.

In this part of the book, I use the shorthand of data quantum when the focus of the conversation is on the design of a data product in the context of architecture, and I use that interchangeably with data product.

As a distributed scale-out architecture, data mesh designs its data products as self-contained, autonomous, and coequal nodes, data quantum, on the mesh. Each data product is designed to be self-sufficient and affords its users and developers with all the capabilities they need to do their job: discover them, understand them, use them, build them, govern them, and debug them. That is why I have dedicated a part of the book on how to approach the design of a self-sufficient data product.

Fundamentals of Software Architecture defines the constituents of architecture as:

Structure

The components and their interfaces, interactions, and integrations ...