In the first part of this book, you learned all the basics of the data mesh. That included building a data mesh MVP for Messflix within a month in chapter 3. The data mesh MVP contains a minimal self-serve platform.
After Messflix starts to build data product after data product, a lot of duplication of efforts happens in terms of ingestion tooling and other data-related technologies. These data-related skills are specialized. Thus, once we start to grow the number of data products, it is time to recall an already known idea: self-serve platforms.
The purpose of a self-serve platform is to take the duplicated and specialized skills out of the many development teams and put them into one platform. Because the platform will be used by many teams, we usually strive to make it self-serve, meaning it retains as much of the development teams’ autonomy as possible.