Data Product Specification

This repository wants to define an open specification to define data products with the following principles in mind:

• DP as an indipendent unit of deployment
• Technology indipendence
• Extensibility

With an open specification will be possible to create services for automatic deployment and interoperable components to build a Data Mesh platform.

Data Product structure

The DP is composed by a general section with DP level information and four sub-structures:

• Environment: where the DP will be deployed, containing all the specific information of the physical environment.
• Output Ports: representing all the different interfaces of the DP to expose the data
• Workloads: Internal jobs/processes to feed the DP and to perform housekeeping ( GDPR, regulation, audit, data quality, etc )
• Observability: provides transparency to the data conusmer about how the DP is currently working. this is not declarative, but exposing runtime data.

Each DP Trait ( Outputport, workload, observability ) will have a well defined and fixed structure and a "specific" one to handle technology specific stuff. The fixed structure must be technology agnostic.

General

• Name: [String] the identifier of the Data Product
• Domain: [String] the identifier of the domain this DP is belonging to
• Description: [String] detailed description about what functional area this DP is representing, what purpose has and business related information.
• Version: [String] this is representing the version of the DP, because we consider the DP as an indipendent unit of deployment, so if a breaking change is needed, we create a brand new versionof the DP
• Owner: [String] Data Product Owner, it could be useful to insert some contact also like the email.
• Email: [String] Point of contact, it could be the owner or a distribution list, but must be reliable and responsive.
• InformationSLA: [String] Describe what SLA the DP team is providing for additional information about the DP
• Status: [String] This is an enum representing the status of this version of the DP [ Draft|Published|Retired ]
• Billing: [Yaml]. This is a free form key-value area where is possible to put information useful for resource tagging and billing.
• Tags: [Array[String]] Free tags at DP level

The unique identifier of a DataProduct is the concatenation of Domain, Name and Version. So we will refer to the DP_UK as a string composed in the following way $DPDomain.$DPName.$DPVersion

Environment

• Name: [String] The name of the environment
• Specific: [Yaml] this is a custom section where we can put all the information strictly related to a specific environment. We use this to set Base Path for API or for bucket names.

Output Ports

• Name: [String] the identifier of the output port
• ResourceType: [String] the kind of output port: raw - SQL - Events. This should be extendible with GraphQL or others.
• Technology: [String] the underlying technology is useful for the consumer to understand better how to consume the output port and also needed for self serve provisioning specific stuff.
• Description: [String] detailed explanation about the function and the meaning of the output port
• issueDate: [String] when this output port has been created
• startDate: [String] the first business date present in the dataset, leave it null for events or we can use some standard semantic like: "-7D, -1Y"
• ProcessDescription: [String] what is the underlying process that contributes to generate the data exposed by this output port
• BillingPolicy: [String] how a consumer will be charged back when it consumes this output port
• SecurityPolicy: [String] additional information related to security aspects, like restrictions, maskings, sensibile information
• ConsumerPolicy: [String] any other information needed by the consumer in order to effectively consume the data, it could be related to technical stuff, regulation, security, etc.
• SLO:[Yaml]
  • IntervalOfChange: [String] How often changes in the data are reflected
  • Timeliness: [String] The skew between the time that a business fact occuts and when it becomes visibile in the data
• Endpoint: [URL] this is the API endpoint that self-describe the output port and provide insightful information at runtime about the physical location of the data, the protocol must be used, etc
• Allow: [Array[String]] It is an array of user/role/group related to the specific technology ( each technology will have an associated authentication system ( Azure AD, AWS IAM, etc ). This field is defining who has access in read-only to this specific output port
• Owner: [String] It is the user/role/group with write privileges for this outputport. This identity can be used only by DP internal processes and the provisioning service.
• DependsOn: [Array[String]] An output port could depend on other output ports, for example a SQL Output port could be dependent on a Raw Output Port because it is just an external table.
• Tags: [Array[String]] Free tags at OutputPort level
• Specific: [Yaml] this is a custom section where we can put all the information strictly related to a specific technology or dependent from a standard/policy defined in the federated governance.

Workloads

• Name: [String] the identifier of the workload
• ResourceType: [String] explain what type of workload is, at the moment: batch or streaming
• Type: [String] This is an enum [HouseKeeping|DataPipeline], Housekeeping is for all the workloads that are acting on internal data without any external dependency. DataPipeline instead is for workloads that are reading from outputport of other DP or external systems.
• Technology: [String] this is a list of technologies: Airflow, Spark, Scala. It is a free field but it is useful to understand better how it is behaving
• Description: [String] detailed explaination about the purpose of the workload, what sources is reading, what business logic is apllying, etc
• DependsOn: [Array[String]] This is filled only for DataPipeline workloads and it represents the list of output ports or external systems that is reading. Output Ports are identified with DP_UK.OutputPort_Name, while external systems will be defined by a string EX_$systemdescription. Here we can elaborate a bit more and create a more semantic struct.
• Tags: [Array[String]] Free tags at Workload level
• Specific: [Yaml] this is a custom section where we can put all the information strictly related to a specific technology or dependent from a standard/policy defined in the federated governance.

Observability

Observability should be applied to each Outputport and is better to represent it as the Swagger of an API rather than something declarative like a Yaml, because it will expose runtime metrics and statistics. Anyway is good to formalize what kind of information should be included and verified at deploy time for the observability API:

• Completeness: degree of availability of all the necessary information along the entire history
• DataProfiling: Volume, distribution of volume along time, range of values, column values distribution and other statistics
• Freshness:
• Availability:
• DataQuality: DataQuality is something that should be customizable but well standardized by the Federated Governance.