Data Products

Happy Friday everyone!

This is part 3 of my 5 part series on implementing data mesh, and today we’re looking at defining data products with data contracts. See also:

Hey friends!

I don’t know about you, but January really has felt like this for me!

Treating data as a product is likely the most widely adopted concept from Data Mesh.

Miro recently wrote up their adoption of data contracts in Data Products Reliability: The Power of Metadata.

When:

• One team provides infrastructure for another
• One team provides code libraries for another
• One team provides an API for another
• One team provides data for another

Each of those are a product being delivered by one team to the next, and that product must meet the consumers requirements.

Data contracts underpin data products.

With data contracts we are explicitly saying data should be treated as a product by those teams who produce the data. That data is then provided through a stable interface.

Data products are a term that is increasingly being talked about, but one which seems to have different meanings to different people.

While data products are for people, they still require an interface that allows people to access them - usually through a system such as a database, an analytics tool, a notebook, and so on.