Designing a data contract

We’ll start by looking at how to design a data contract. This can be broken down into four steps:

1. Identifying the purpose.
2. Considering the trade-offs.
3. Defining the data contract.
4. Deploying the data contract.

However, designing a data contract is an iterative process, and you may need to revisit and refine these steps as more information is gathered through discussions between the data generators and data consumers.

With that in mind, let’s look at each step in turn.

Identifying the purpose

The first step is to identify the purpose of this data product for which you are defining a data contract. Who is this data for, and how will they use it? What problems will it solve? What business value will it drive?

Answering these questions will naturally start a discussion between the data generators and the data consumers, and as we’ve been discussing throughout this book, bringing these groups of people together...