5 data contract implementations in the wild
Hello for the last time in 2025!
Today I’m sharing 5 examples of data contracts in practice.
Also links to articles on the latest release of ODCS, the unavoidable movement of data, and being a Staff+ engineer in infra/platform teams.
Thanks for reading this year, and I’ll see you in the next one!
5 data contract implementations in the wild
Because many companies make it difficult to talk/write about their stack, there are many more posts about data contracts in theory rather than in practice. So, I keep a list of real world data contract implementations as a reference.
These are my top 5 publicly documented implementations.
1. Miro
Miro wrote up their adoption of data contracts in Data Products Reliability: The Power of Metadata.
This describes their most recent iteration of data contracts, building on from their initial approach, which had already been successful:
Through dedicated efforts over multiple quarters, we achieved remarkable improvements, reducing our key pipeline’s downtime from 50% to nearly 1% today. This transformation underscores the crucial role of defining and validating data contracts, which have proven indispensable in fostering trust in our data assets.
The post goes on to explain the benefits of data products and the changes they made to their development processes as part of the move to a data product approach.
2. Nandos
Ben Watson at Nandos, a South African restaurant chain operating in 30 countries, has a great write up on their modern data platform with data mesh and data contracts.
The problem they solved with data contracts is this:
We often get questions like “which tables do we share with external company X?” or “if I change this table then who will be impacted?”. Being able to quickly answer these questions and have confidence that this information is up-to-date is important for maintaining a stable data platform that can iterate quickly without constantly breaking hidden dependencies on other teams.
That’s a typical problem which data contracts can help any organisation solve.
They then discuss in detail how they implemented this on Google Cloud (Nandos prefer to build their own tools), so well worth reading the article if you’re interested in that.
They finish the article discussing data culture, and I loved this sentence:
Running a successful data platform requires more than just technical work and as such much of our effort is culture-focused.
3. Adevinta Spain
Sergio Couto at Adevinta Spain describes in great detail their journal to increased data ownership and integrated data governance.
This is a particularly good example of the automation that can be built around a data contract, for example with ingestion:
A single code to ingest several sources of data in a standardised way. There is no need to code again for each new source. In fact we can extend this code with some minor changes to other types of events with differences in definition time or in the schema format.
They are empower the producer with autonomy to embed the sense of ownership.
4. MatHem
Robert Sahlin wrote a nice post on the data platform at MatHem, a Swedish retailer.
It’s a great example of a contract-based data platform, and the YAML -> Pulumi -> BigQuery setup is the same as the example used in my book Driving Data Quality with Data Contracts.
5. GoCardless
Where it all began! I wrote 4 posts on the GoCardless tech blog about our data contracts implementation:
Improving Data Quality with Data Contracts introduced the concept almost exactly 4 years ago and went somewhat viral, leading to me having calls with people all over the world doing similar things but without calling it data contracts.
Data Contracts at GoCardless - 6 Months On reviewed our progress 6 months later and what we had learned and implemented in that time.
Implementing Data Contracts at GoCardless went a bit deeper into the implementation of data contracts and how and why it was built on top of our infrastructure platform.
3 Things Our Software Engineers Love About Data Contracts came directly from being on a call with one of our Principal Software Engineers and a 3rd party and him explaining to them how much it helped him and his team. I kept quiet, took notes, and wrote it up.
A great example of how when you really engage software engineers (or anyone else) they will be your promoters, and do so better and with more authority than you might.
Interesting links
ODCS v3.1.0 is Here: Relationships, Richer Metadata, and Stricter Validation by Jean-Georges Perrin
The latest release of the Bitol Open Data Contract Standard.
Also this week it was announced by IBM their Data Product Hub now supports ODCS.
You Gotta Push If You Wanna Pull by Gunnar Morling
An argument that we will always need to move data around, and that’s ok, as long as there is one canonical truth.
Why I Ignore The Spotlight as a Staff Engineer by Lalit Maganti
Good read on being a Staff+ engineer in infra/platform teams.
Being punny 😅
Those who don’t like Christmas are Claus-trophobic.
Thanks! If you’d like to support my work…
Thanks for reading this weeks newsletter — always appreciated!
If you’d like to support my work consider buying my book, Driving Data Quality with Data Contracts, or if you have it already please leave a review on Amazon.
🆕 Also check out my self-paced course on Implementing Data Contracts.
Andrew