Summary

In this chapter, we introduced the concept of a contract-driven data architecture. This is an architecture driven by data contracts and the metadata we define within them. We showed how powerful this idea is, and why we believe it’s a step-change in how we build data platforms.

We use this pattern to build more generic data tooling, where instead of building similar pipelines as point solutions we can build tooling that doesn’t mandate anything about the data and how it is structured if we have enough context about the data, defined as metadata in the data contract. When adopting this pattern, it’s recommended to build a data infrastructure team, whose remit is to build this tooling for the adoption of all data generators, wherever they are in the organization.

To illustrate how this pattern is different from how we built platforms before, we walked through a case study of a previous service we implemented at GoCardless, the Data Platform Gateway...