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CONCEPT Cited by 1 source

Hub-and-Spoke Governance

Hub-and-spoke governance is the posture where a single central catalog owns metadata + access-control policy + identity for the whole mesh ("hub"), while the underlying data stays in its native place of production and ownership ("spokes"). Policy is authored and enforced centrally; data is produced and consumed peripherally.

This is the governance model systems/unity-catalog positions for a concepts/data-mesh — especially once the mesh crosses region, metastore, or cloud boundaries.

Properties

  • One access-control surface. A consumer asking "can I read after-sales?" gets the same answer regardless of whether the data physically lives on AWS or Azure. Teams don't re-implement policy per cloud.
  • Centralised lineage / audit. Every share, every grant, every replica runs through the same catalog, so auditing "who has access to what" is one query, not a cross-cloud survey.
  • Federated data, not federated policy. Policies are centralised; the data itself can live wherever it's produced and in whatever native format is convenient. Mercedes-Benz's source is Iceberg on AWS Glue, federated into UC and then shared out as Delta — the data stays in its home format/region.
  • A mesh that scales beyond one team. Without a hub, the mesh degrades into bilateral integrations; every new consumer renegotiates permissions with every producer. With a hub, new consumers subscribe through the catalog.

The Mercedes-Benz realisation

  • Hub = systems/unity-catalog as global catalog for all data products across the enterprise.
  • Spokes = data products owned by domain teams (R&D, After-Sales, Marketing), living in their native clouds (AWS / Azure) and metastores.
  • Exchange wire = systems/delta-sharing between metastores.
  • Control surface = systems/ddx-orchestrator (DDX) sits on top of the hub and automates the permission-grant / Sync-Job / workflow operations.

(Source: sources/2026-04-20-databricks-mercedes-benz-cross-cloud-data-mesh)

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