Data Contract
ELI5 — The Vibe Check
It's like a pinky promise between two teams, but legally binding (well, technically binding). Team A says 'I promise this data will always have these columns, in this format, updated every hour.' If they break the promise, alarms go off. No more 'who changed the schema at 3am?!' incidents.
Real Talk
A formal agreement between data producers and consumers that defines the structure, semantics, quality guarantees, and SLAs of a dataset. Data contracts ensure reliable data exchange between services and teams by making schema and quality expectations explicit and enforceable.
When You'll Hear This
"Our Data Contract caught the breaking schema change before it hit production." / "We enforce Data Contracts in CI — if your change violates the contract, the pipeline fails."
Related Terms
Data Mesh
Instead of one giant warehouse where ALL the company's data goes (and one poor team manages it), Data Mesh says 'each team owns their own data like it's a
Schema Registry
Think of it as the dictionary police for your data. Every message that flows through your system has to be registered in the Schema Registry first, like ge