An apparatus in one embodiment comprises at least one processing device having a processor coupled to a memory. The one or more processing devices are operative to configure a plurality of distributed processing nodes to communicate over a network, to abstract content locally accessible in respective data zones of respective ones of the distributed processing nodes into respective catalogs of a distributed catalog service in accordance with a layered extensible data model, and to provide in the distributed processing nodes a plurality of microservices for performing processing operations on at least one of the layered extensible data model and the catalogs. The layered extensible data model comprises a plurality of layers including a core data model layer and at least one extensions layer. The microservices may comprise at least one microservice to alter the layered extensible data model and at least one microservice to query one or more of the catalogs.