How to Build the Data Mesh Foundation: A Principled Approach

Organizations have been chasing the dream of data democratization, unlocking and accessing data at scale to serve their customers and business, for over a half a century from early days of data warehousing. They have been trying to reach this dream through multiple generations of architectures, such as data warehouse and data lake, through a cambrian explosion of tools and a large amount of investments to build their next data platform. Despite the intention and the investments the results have been middling. In this keynote, Zhamak shares her observations on the failure modes of a centralized paradigm of a data lake, and its predecessor data warehouse. She introduces Data Mesh, a paradigm shift in big data management that draws from modern distributed architecture: considering domains as the first class concern, applying self-sovereignty to distribute the ownership of data, applying platform thinking to create self-serve data infrastructure, and treating data as a product. This talk introduces the principles underpinning data mesh and Zhamak's recent learnings in creating a path to bring data mesh to life in your organization.