PATTERN Cited by 1 source
Automatic asset association by identity¶
Problem¶
In large data platforms with millions of assets, manually cataloging which assets belong to which team or logical group is error-prone and perpetually out of date. Engineers forget to register new tables; orphaned assets proliferate; discovery is painful.
Solution¶
Leverage the executing identity as the association mechanism: any asset created by a workload running under a project identity is automatically registered as belonging to that project ("gravity"). The platform's asset-creation path checks the caller's identity and writes the project association at creation time.
Consequences¶
- Positive: Zero-cost organization; eliminates discovery burden; new assets automatically inherit project access controls.
- Negative: Pre-existing assets require explicit migration; semantic sub-grouping within a project may eventually be needed.
Canonical implementation¶
Netflix calls this property gravity — the Data Project becomes the "center of mass" for everything produced under its identity (Source: sources/2026-06-19-netflix-data-projects-managing-data-assets-at-netflix-scale).