What is data mesh?
“Data mesh is a decentralized model for data, where domain experts like product engineers or LLM specialists control and manage their own data,” says Ahsan Farooqi, global head of data and analytics, Orion Innovation. While data mesh is tied to certain underlying technologies, it’s really a shift in thinking more than anything else. In an organization that has embraced data mesh architecture, domain-specific data is treated as a product owned by the teams relevant to those domains. “Data mesh empowers teams and treats data as a strategic asset,” Farooqi says.
Data mesh arises from the concept of domain-driven design, which in turn informed the idea of microservices-based architectures. You can think of data mesh like a microservices-based architecture for data: Data under a specific domain is owned by the appropriate teams, who use APIs or other techniques to make that data available to potential consumers.
What is data fabric?
Data fabric is a type of architecture designed to provide unified access to the data stored in various places across your organization. As Matt Williams, field CTO at Cornelis Networks, puts it, “Data fabric is an architecture and set of data services that provides intelligent, real-time access to data — regardless of where it lives — across on-prem, cloud, hybrid, and edge environments. This is the architecture of choice for large data centers across multiple applications.”
