Separate storage from compute deliberately
Elastic compute unlocks cost control and workload isolation, but only when governance and metadata are centralized. Without this, teams recreate silos in a new stack.
Design for multi-modal data products
AI workloads need structured tables, event streams, documents, and embeddings to coexist. The platform should support each data type with shared lineage and access controls.
- Bronze/Silver/Gold data product contracts
- Versioned schema and metadata enforcement
- Unified catalog for analytics and ML discovery
Operationalize with platform SLOs
Data platforms should be managed like products. Define SLOs for freshness, quality, and availability, then automate alerts and incident response around them.
This is how lakehouses become enterprise infrastructure instead of pilot environments.