🏗️ Data Mesh Needed an Infrastructure. The Lakehouse Needed a Purpose. Was It Love?
Introduction Data mesh has been generating a lot of noise. Some teams swear by it, others think it’s just a rebranding of problems they already had. But underneath the debate, there’s a real architectural question worth answering: if you’re moving toward domain-owned data, what does your infrastructure actually look like? The lakehouse keeps coming up as the answer. And for good reason — but it’s not the full picture. You still need serving layers, you still have to justify the cost, and you need to understand why a traditional data warehouse doesn’t quite fit the mesh model even if it also separates compute from storage these days. That’s what this post covers. No hype, just the architectural logic. ...