Registry Governance and Lineage

Treat the registry as the control plane

Three governance practices that pay off immediately:

1. Webhooks on transitions — fire a Slack/Jira/PagerDuty event whenever a model moves to Production. The act of shipping becomes auditable.
2. Two-person rule — registry permissions split between proposer and approver. Same pattern as protected branches.
3. Lineage — keep run_id, git_commit, and data_uri as tags on the version. Six months later you can answer: which data trained this model?

A real outage pattern

A model in Production started returning constant predictions. The registry alias pointed at version 14. Lineage tags showed the run used a data snapshot from a partition that had been dropped two days earlier. Rollback to version 12 took 30 sec.

Without lineage that diagnosis takes a day, not 30 seconds.

The registry is your air-traffic control tower: nothing lands in production without a tower-cleared callsign. Webhooks are the flight strips moving across the desk — every transition leaves a paper trail.