Combining Data Fabric and Data Mesh

Rhys Hanscombe
Sep 10, 2024
3 min read

At the 2024 Data Vault Conference, Jonas De Keuster delivered a forward-looking session on how organizations can combine Data Fabric and Data Mesh to create a truly modern, agile, and value-driven data architecture. If you missed it, here’s your friendly recap—and a reminder to join our forum to keep the conversation going!

The Hype Cycle: Data Mesh Evolves

According to the latest Gartner Hype Cycle, Data Mesh is predicted to become “obsolete before plateau”—not because it’s dead, but because of challenges like domain boundary identification, technical complexity, team skills, interoperability, cultural change, data quality, and regulatory compliance. In 2024, the focus has shifted: “Data Mesh has been subsumed into Data Fabric”.

Data Products Take Center Stage

A key insight from the session: organizations are now prioritizing data products—curated sets of data, metadata, semantics, and templates designed for immediate business value. Data products are dominating organizational focus, shifting attention from the interconnected domains of Data Mesh to a broader technical architecture perspective.

What Is Data Mesh? What Is Data Fabric?

Data Mesh: A decentralized approach where each business domain manages its own data as a product, using standardized interfaces and tools for sharing. It’s inspired by microservices—loosely coupled, independently deployable, and organized around business capabilities.
Data Fabric: An architectural approach that enables seamless data integration and management across platforms, leveraging metadata, AI, and automation to create a unified, flexible data infrastructure for real-time access and consistent, reusable data services.

The Challenge: Data Product Delivery Is Still Immature

Despite the hype, delivering data products remains a challenge. Data modeling and transformation make up 80–90% of the workload, but are the least automated parts of the process. This leads to manual work, technical debt, incomplete data, and innovation paralysis. Automation is key to unlocking agility and reducing risk.

The Hybrid Solution: Best of Both Worlds

The big takeaway? Combine Data Fabric and Data Mesh for a hybrid architecture:

Fabric for Implementation and Infrastructure: Use Data Fabric to deliver an integrated foundation layer as a service—a single version of the facts for all domains.
Mesh for Presentation and Delivery: Shift domain-driven data product delivery to the presentation layer, where each domain can build and deliver data products using shared, repeatable logic.
Shared Library: Build a library of transformation patterns to accelerate data product delivery across domains.

Practical Steps and Platform Layers

Infrastructure Utility Plane: Decouples consumers from the underlying infrastructure.
Data Product Experience Plane: Manages the lifecycle of data products—creation, validation, deployment, and more.
Mesh Experience Plane: Provides a marketplace for searching, accessing, and querying data products.
Foundation Layer as a Service: Acts as the backbone, delivering real business value and supporting both centralized and distributed approaches.

Key Takeaways

Hybrid is the future: Combine centralized (fabric) and distributed (mesh) approaches for maximum value.
Foundation Layer as a Service: Add real business value to your data infrastructure.
Pre-defined transformation patterns: Use a shared library to speed up data product delivery.

Join the Data Community!

Sign up to our forum: Share your experiences, ask questions, and connect with fellow data enthusiasts.
Stay up to date: We host regular webinars, workshops, and meetups—don’t miss out!
Shape the future: Your feedback and participation help us build better tools and resources for everyone.

Final Thoughts

The future of data management is hybrid—combining the strengths of Data Fabric and Data Mesh to deliver scalable, agile, and business-focused solutions. Ready to take your data architecture to the next level? Join the conversation, sign up for our next webinar, and let’s build the future of data together!