Data Mesh

Data mesh is an organizational and architectural approach to data management that distributes data ownership to the business domains that produce it, rather than centralizing all data in a single platform team. Each domain owns, documents, and serves its data as a product — a 'data product' — accessible to other domains through a self-serve infrastructure.

Data mesh was introduced by Zhamak Dehghani as a response to the bottlenecks created by centralized data lake and warehouse teams. In AI contexts, data mesh enables faster AI development by giving AI teams direct, trusted access to high-quality domain data without waiting for a central team. The four pillars are: domain ownership, data as a product, self-serve infrastructure, and federated computational governance.