Declarative Orchestration: Why You’ve Been Thinking About the Wrong DAG the Entire Time

In declarative, asset-oriented orchestration, the practitioner builds and schedules data pipelines using assets as the foundational abstraction, rather than tasks. In this talk, Nick will explain how this seemingly simple idea goes beyond improved developer ergonomics: it has profound consequences for the entire data platform. Your orchestrator doesn’t just execute pipelines, but is the system of record for your production data assets. Built-in data quality, lineage, and cataloging means you can consolidate tools with an integrated experience. And instead of the data mesh as a fuzzy theory, you can see it directly manifest in a product as a living asset graph, built on shared infrastructure.