Discovering data contracts

When you’ve successfully built an autonomous, contract-driven data platform, you’ll find the number of data contracts explode.

Suddenly you have hundreds, and you didn’t realise, because you’re not reviewing each one.

Some will be really critical to your business with many consumers creating valuable applications on them.

Some will be very specific, where one team needed to store data to use for their own purposes.

That’s ok! It shows your platform is performing well. People are able to self-serve and create and manage data that has some value to them or others.

But then you have a discovery problem. How do people find the most useful data contracts?

They do this using a data catalog.

Many organisations already have a data catalog, but they become much more important when you move to a world with data contracts, where data is created freely (but still well governed) by many different teams with many different levels of criticality.

Data catalogs make data contracts discoverable.