Summary

In this chapter, we’ve started to see exactly what makes up a data contract. A large part of the data contract is the schema. We explored various open source schema formats to understand how we can use them to define schemas and the different functionality we can add to those schemas. We also looked at how we can make schemas accessible by using a schema registry to act as the source of truth for them.

However, schemas can only define how the data looks at a set point in time. Data will evolve, and so will the schema. So, we then discussed how to evolve your data over time and how to migrate your consumers to a new version without causing major disruption or breaking existing applications unexpectedly.

We finished the chapter by looking at how we can use data contracts to manage the governance and controls of data through the specification of metadata that describes the data.

We can then use that metadata to integrate with any tool or service. This can be done...