Governance is frequently viewed as an administrative function managed through documents and meetings. In a production engineering environment, however, it operates as a technical discipline. Effective data management requires shifting from manual enforcement to automated systems where policies exist as code.

This chapter establishes the engineering protocols necessary for managing data access, ownership, and security. We will define governance requirements using technical terminology and look at methods for programmatically classifying data assets. You will learn to implement Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) models directly within your infrastructure configuration. Additionally, the curriculum covers Policy-as-Code architectures, enabling you to write tests that enforce compliance rules before code merges. By the end of this module, you will be able to apply access policies using Python and ensure that governance logic functions reliably within your data systems.