Summary

We have concluded this book by looking at what it is like working with data contracts in practice. We started this chapter by looking at how to design a data contract, going step-by-step through identifying the purpose of the contract, considering the trade-offs the data generator needs to make, defining the agreed data contract, and deploying it to production.

Then, we looked at how to monitor and enforce those data contracts, including the definition itself, and then, once it is in production, the quality, performance, and dependability of the data. We discussed how, with data quality, there are two types we need to monitor: those we predicted in advance, and those we didn’t. After this, we discussed how we can detect those issues at different places in our architecture.

Finally, we looked at how to publish data to the data contract. We described why you might need to implement transactional guarantees if your data needs a high level of consistency between the...