Data contracts and the data mesh
Data mesh was invented by Zhamak Dehghani in 2019 (https://martinfowler.com/articles/data-monolith-to-mesh.html) and is a design pattern for building a domain-oriented, decentralized data platform. It focuses not just on the technology, but also the social and cultural changes required to achieve this goal and solve many of the problems we discussed in Chapter 1, A Brief History of Data Platforms.
The pattern is described through four principles:
- Domain ownership
- Data as a product
- Self-serve data platform
- Federated computational governance
Let’s go through each principle in turn and discuss how they relate to data contracts.
Domain ownership
Data mesh proposes a domain-oriented approach to organizing the responsibility and ownership of the data, where this ownership is decentralized to the business domains closest to the data – ideally, the data generators. They are the ones who know most about the data...
