Book excerpt: Many enterprises are investing in a next-generation data lake, hoping to democratize data at scale to provide business insights and ultimately make automated intelligent decisions. In this practical book, author Zhamak Dehghani reveals that, despite the time, money, and effort poured into them, data warehouses and data lakes fail when applied at the scale and speed of today's organizations. A distributed data mesh is a better choice. Dehghani guides architects, technical leaders, and decision makers on their journey from monolithic big data architecture to a sociotechnical paradigm that draws from modern distributed architecture. A data mesh considers domains as a first-class concern, applies platform thinking to create self-serve data infrastructure, treats data as a product, and introduces a federated and computational model of data governance. This book shows you why and how. Examine the current data landscape from the perspective of business and organizational needs, environmental challenges, and existing architectures Analyze the landscape's underlying characteristics and failure modes Get a complete introduction to data mesh principles and its constituents Learn how to design a data mesh architecture Move beyond a monolithic data lake to a distributed data mesh.