Data engineering involves numerous tools–a data lake, databases, data warehouses, numerous APIs, streaming systems, and microservices. There is no shortage of ways to interact with data and manage data, but many companies are struggling to figure out design patterns and best practices for how to manage data and build data infrastructure.

Zhamak Dehgani is a principal consultant and portfolio director with ThoughtWorks, where she works with enterprises to improve their software systems and workflows. She is the author of an article called How to Move Beyond a Monolithic Data Lake to a Distributed Data Mesh and she joins the show to discuss her perspective on data infrastructure, as well as the “data mesh” concept that she has coined.

Data mesh represents the movement away from having a centralized data lake that all teams interact with, and towards having different data products and individual data management systems for individual domain teams.