A Contract-Driven Data Architecture
In the previous chapter, we saw exactly what makes up a data contract. In this chapter, we’re going to build on that by looking at how we can use the data contract to drive our data architecture. We’ll introduce the concept of a contract-driven data architecture and show how powerful this can be. We believe this is a step-change in how we build data platforms, and we’ll discuss the many benefits we get when adopting this architecture pattern.
As part of that discussion, we’ll introduce the three principles that unlock those benefits: autonomy, guardrails, and consistency, and you’ll learn how those principles benefit the data generators, the data consumers, and the organization. To promote autonomy, we need to provide tooling that can be self-served by the data generators. We’ll finish this chapter by looking at why that is important and show an example of how to achieve it.
By the end of this chapter...
