Data Mesh and Data Governance — Decentralizing Data Ownership

The centralized data team was a bottleneck. Every request for a new dataset meant weeks of waiting. Data Mesh offers an alternative — decentralized data ownership with central governance.

Four Principles of Data Mesh¶

• Domain-oriented ownership — the team that produces the data is responsible for it
• Data as a product — datasets have SLOs, documentation, and an owner
• Self-serve data platform — infrastructure for easy publishing and consumption of data
• Federated computational governance — central standards, decentralized implementation

Our Implementation¶

Each domain team publishes datasets as “data products” in Snowflake. Standardized format: schema, documentation, data quality tests, SLO (freshness, completeness). Data catalog in Apache Atlas.

Governance Without Bureaucracy¶

Automated policies: PII detection, retention rules, access control. A data steward on every team. The central team defines standards, domain teams implement them. It works — but requires a cultural shift.

Data Mesh Is Not a Silver Bullet¶

It requires mature teams and a strong platform. But for organizations where the central data team can’t keep up, it’s the way forward.