WellSky, Inc. is creating buzz around it’s One Platform initiative in the data space while on a journey to forge itself into a data centric company. The Enterprise team within WellSky is creating a confluence of concepts, technology, a hyper-focused organizational structure, top talent, and old fashioned ingenuity to solve common issues within the data management, data governance, and infrastructure spaces that plague data warehouses, and data lakes.
Traditional approaches are the monoliths of the data space. They are often too complex, too slow, too cumbersome, and too large to meet the needs of a rapidly shifting business environment causing data related efforts to miss the mark by a considerable distance. At the heart of this wave of change are the data mesh principles introduced by Zhamak Dehghani in her book Data Mesh. Zhamak lays out the concepts that break down the use cases for data warehouses and reassembles them into a mesh architecture. The concepts are not far from a service mesh where nodes on the mesh are comparable to microservices. These nodes, known as data products, range in size and complexity but all meet certain criteria to become part of the mesh. Organizationally data products are not centrally owned or governed, they follow a domain driven approach that federates the work out to the teams that know their data and how to manage it the best. This and this alone is what accelerates data related projects up with the speed of its business.
While simple and groundbreaking, what lacks in this burgeoning approach is the practical application of it. The mesh needs a concrete architecture to bridge the gap between concept, design, and application. That’s where WellSky’s talented and thought leading engineers are investing their efforts. Michael Billings, a principal data architect at WellSky joined to tackle this exact problem and says “Data Mesh is ground breaking! It brings general concepts in the software engineering world to data. By turning how we think about data and who owns, then enabling those owners to manage it on their own timeline is revolutionary.”
Like a service mesh, a data mesh needs infrastructure and a framework to function. It needs components like an ownership registry, data product registry, standards and guidelines, CICD pipelines, and infrastructure wrapped up in self-service tools and automated processes.
WellSky is connecting the dots to provide one of the first end-to-end practical implementations of a data mesh so stay tuned as they intend to share it’s thought leadership in this space in the marketplace through bi-monthly talks and forums on subjects like how to make these efforts successful by providing business value, architecture, and practical application.
