DATA PRODUCT ACCELERATOR (DPA)
Accelerate Data Product Delivery with Built-In Governance
A self-service Internal Developer Platform for Azure and AWS that turns your organisation's
approved architectures and governance standards into ready-to-deploy templates — giving
developer teams the autonomy to ship data products fast, without bypassing enterprise controls.
THE CHALLENGE
Data development teams spend weeks on undifferentiated setup — getting approvals, waiting for infrastructure provisioning, configuration, access management, and CI/CD setup — before writing a single line of business logic. Every team does it differently. Governance is retrofitted. Platform teams become bottlenecks.
HOW IT WORKS
Platform Engineer
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Provisions ready-to-deploy environments that support various runtimes
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Configures approval gates for higher environments
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Sets governance policies once — inherited by all
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Onboards new teams
Developer
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Picks a runtime and target environment
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Answers a short wizard (name, owner, config)
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Receives a fully wired repo + pipeline + infrastructure
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Builds data products
PERSONAS
Platform Engineer — "Sets the rails, not the train"
Defines infrastructure tiers, governance policies, and approval gates. Maintains the platform templates. Not involved in day-to-day application delivery — DPA does that automatically.
Developer — "Builds products, not plumbing"
A data engineer or analyst within a business unit. Self-serves a production-ready, governed environment through the platform catalog — no cloud expertise required, no tickets, no waiting.
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WHAT GETS BAKED IN — EVERY TIME
Approved Architectures
Only pre-vetted, EA-approved patterns are available as templates. Developers can't provision something that hasn't been approved.
Identity & Access
Group ownership, RBAC role assignments, and resource-level grants provisioned automatically at scaffold time.
Governance Policies
Data classification, retention, naming, and access control policies embedded in the template — not left to the developer.
Audit Trail
Every deployment writes a structured audit record — visible in the catalog UI, ready for compliance and security review.
CI/CD Pipeline
A fully wired deployment pipeline with plan, apply, and promote stages. Approval gates enforced at the environment level.
Catalog Registration
Every product, environment, and resource is auto-registered with ownership graph, dependency map, and ops history.
Team Isolation
Repository permissions and cloud resource grants are structurally scoped to the owning team — cross-team access is not possible.
Standards & Tagging
Consistent resource names, repo names, group names, and cloud tags enforced uniformly — no exceptions, no drift.
KEY BENEFITS
Enterprise Standards, Encoded Once — Applied Everywhere
Architecture decisions, security baselines, network topology, naming conventions, and compliance controls are defined once by platform and architecture teams — then baked into templates. Every product provisioned through DPA inherits these standards automatically, with no risk of deviation or manual error.
​Any Runtime, Same Governance Model
​Platform engineers publish templates for any approved technology — Azure Databricks, Microsoft Fabric, serverless functions, containers, AWS Glue, and more. Developers pick from this curated menu. The governance model is identical regardless of the runtime chosen: same access control, same audit trail, same promotion path.
Self-Service Without Waiting
Because every available template is already pre-approved by enterprise architecture, developers don't need to raise requests or wait for infrastructure teams. The approval happened at template creation time, not at every use. For organisations that require a formal change record, DPA integrates with ticketing systems (ServiceNow, Jira, etc.) so the workflow is captured without slowing delivery.
Structural Team Isolation
Every application and environment is owned by a named identity group. Repository permissions and cloud resource grants are scoped to that group at provisioning time. Teams cannot access or modify another team's applications, pipelines, or data assets — isolation is architectural, not policy-based.
Frictionless Promotion Across Environments
​Promoting a data product from dev to staging or production means selecting the target environment in the same wizard. The platform resolves the backing infrastructure automatically — no manual steps, no environment-specific runbooks.
Full Organisational Visibility
​A live catalog maps every deployed product — who owns it, what it depends on, which environment it runs in, and its full deployment history. Platform, architecture, and security teams have instant visibility without spreadsheets or tribal knowledge.
TECHNOLOGY
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Platform Core
Backstage · Terraform · Git & CI/CD · Identity Provider
Cloud Providers
Microsoft Azure · Amazon Web Services
Supported Runtimes
Data Platforms (Databricks, Fabric, Glue, etc.) · Serverless · Containers · Any Cloud Service
