Data engineering·Orchestration and running it in anger
the source team's deploy pipeline fails if they remove a field your models depend on, because the expectation is written down and checked.
Data contract
Also calledschema contract, producer contract
An explicit, enforced agreement between a data producer and its consumers covering schema, semantics, freshness and how change is communicated. The word 'enforced' is the entire point: a document nobody's CI reads is a wish. It moves the cost of a breaking change from the consumer discovering it at 09:00 to the producer discovering it at commit time, which is the only version of this that survives contact with a busy product team.