This is my first Open Source Book - a collaborative effort to come up with a book explaining how Zhamak Dehghani's Data Mesh can be put to use - both organizationally and technically. While Zhamak is going to release her book titled Data Mesh with O'Reilly at the end of this year, our aim is to finish a first edition of ours only shortly after to augment Zhamak's book with a more practically-oriented companion.
For us, Practically means both technically, i.e., how Zhamak's Data Mesh principles can be implemented with software, but even more so, organizationally. We think that Data Mesh has so far often been slightly misunderstood as a more technical, architectural concept just confined to the analytics space, but for us, the organizational consequences advocated by Zhamak also beyond the analytics space are even more important and powerful.
We see Data Mesh as a continuation of the fundamental business concept described originally by Alfred P. Sloan in his 1964 Doubleday book My Time With General Motors, where he wrote:
It has been a thesis of this book that good management rests on a reconciliation of centralization and decentralization, or decentralization with co-ordinated control.
In the software world, the same idea has been taken up numerous times, most notably in Eric Evan's 2003 book Domain-Driven Design and Sam Newman's 2015 book Building Microservices, but until Zhamak's Data Mesh, the software and the business world have stayed disconnected for the most part. Their intersection and the need for a coordinated decentralization in both worlds has rarely been discussed and taken up, and we think that Data Mesh provides a big opportunity to re-connect the software with the business world.
The audience of this book should be primarily those in charge - the managers and executives who can actually drive the change necessary to implement the principles of Data Mesh in their organizations. They are the primary audience because for us, Data Mesh is more of an organizational concept, and less of an architectural one.
The secondary audience is software engineers/architects who are going to be those who have do execute the necessary changes on the technical side.
This is the outline.
This is the reading list.
We have decided to use Markdown as our markup language for writing the book for simplicity and to make the entrance barrier for new writers as low as possible.
- Ralph Debusmann
- Pavan Keshavamurthy (https://platformatory.io/)
- everybody else is welcome!