Governance Rules
& Policies
Define, track, and score governance standards across all your schema registries — regardless of the provider. Rules are stored in event7, not in your registry, making governance truly provider-agnostic.
Rules vs Policies
event7 manages two types of governance entries in the same engine:
- ·Technically verifiable constraints
- ·Have an expression (CEL, JSONATA, regex)
- ·Can be synced to providers
- ·Kinds: CONDITION, TRANSFORM, VALIDATION
- ·Higher weight in scoring
- ·Organizational standards
- ·Describe what should be true
- ·Not enforced by any provider
- ·Kind: POLICY
- ·Verified via enrichments or schema inspection
Both contribute to the governance score, but rules carry more weight because they are objectively verifiable.
Rule Scopes
Every rule has a scope that defines its technical nature:
Executed by the serializer/deserializer at produce/consume time.
CEL condition, encryption transform, JSONATA migration
Applied when registering a schema in the registry.
Compatibility level, validity check, integrity check
Organizational standard, not automatically enforced.
Owner required, no transforms on RAW data
Checked after the fact for scoring and reporting.
Naming convention, max field count, doc presence
Runtime and Control Plane rules can be synced to providers. Declarative and Audit rules live only in event7.
Enforcement Lifecycle
Rules go through a lifecycle that tracks their enforcement status:
A mismatch was detected between event7 and the provider. The rule exists in both places but with different expressions or parameters.
Declarative and Audit rules can only be Declared or Expected. The Synced/Verified/Drifted states require a corresponding entry in the provider.
Severity Levels
| Severity | Score Impact | Use for |
|---|---|---|
| Critical | Major | Compliance: encryption, PII protection |
| Error | Significant | Important standards: compatibility, required fields |
| Warning | Moderate | Best practices: documentation, ownership |
| Info | No penalty | Recommendations and guidelines |
Templates
event7 ships with four governance templates based on classic data layers. Apply them to a subject or to your entire registry in one click.
Minimal constraints for data collection. Backward compatibility, source metadata, no transforms.
Strict governance for the canonical model. Full transitive compatibility, mandatory fields, PII encryption, ownership.
For aggregated data. Backward transitive compatibility, must reference Core types, aggregation period.
Lightweight for consumption views. Backward compatibility, keep schemas simple (max 30 fields).
You can also create your own templates for any governance model — Data Mesh domains, compliance frameworks (GDPR, PCI-DSS), criticality levels, or any custom category. Clone a builtin template as a starting point, or build from scratch.
Templates don't overwrite existing rules unless you explicitly choose to. You can apply multiple templates to the same registry.
Governance Score
The score gives a quick health check across three axes, calculated on the fly:
- Description (5)
- Owner (5)
- Tags (5)
- Classification (5)
- Weighted by severity
- Verifiable > declared
- Runtime weighs more
- Compatibility (10)
- Documentation (5)
- References (5)
- Versioning (10)
A confidence indicator (high / medium / low) reflects how many rules are objectively verifiable vs. self-declared.
Provider Compatibility
| Capability | Confluent | Apicurio | Glue | Azure | Pulsar |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Compatibility | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Validity | ✅ | ✅ | — | — | — |
| Data Rules (CEL) | ✅ | — | — | — | — |
| Migration Rules | ✅ | — | — | — | — |
For providers without native rule support, event7 stores rules as declarative entries. They still contribute to scoring and governance visibility — they're just not enforced at the provider level.
Quick Start
Roadmap
| Rules & Policies CRUD | ✓ Available |
| Templates (RAW/CORE/REFINED/APP) | ✓ Available |
| Custom templates | ✓ Available |
| Governance Score (3-axis + confidence) | ✓ Available |
| Dashboard & Catalog integration | ✓ Available |
| Provider sync — import from Confluent | Planned |
| Provider sync — push to Confluent | Planned |
| Drift detection | Planned |
| Automated policy evaluation | Planned |