Source Contracts
Per-source agreements declaring shape, freshness, owner, error budget, and breakage policy — the discipline that makes pipeline failures attributable.
Without contracts, a broken pipeline is a forensic investigation. With contracts, it is a page to a named owner with the failed records waiting in a dead-letter table.
What it solves
Makes ingestion failures routable. The downstream consumer no longer needs to chase the source team; the source team is paged automatically when their contract is violated.
How we build it
Each source declares its contract in code: typed schema, freshness SLO, error budget, breakage policy. Validation runs at ingestion; violations either retry, route to dead letter, or hard-fail. The contract is versioned; downstream consumers subscribe to changes.
- Typed schema with semantic metadata
- Freshness SLO with measurement method
- Error budget and breakage policy
- Versioned contract with consumer subscriptions
What changes when it is in place
Pipeline failures stop being mysterious. Downstream agents and dashboards learn to trust the data, and freshness telemetry lets retrieval skip silently-stale sources.