Notebook users want one simple command whether the destination is MySQL, BigQuery, Spanner, or a Dataproc cluster. Platform teams, however, must consistently handle identity, authorization, connection lifecycle, metadata, auditability, failure behavior, and observability across systems with very different APIs. Reimplementing those controls inside every connector creates drift and makes new backends expensive to govern.

This lightning talk presents a connector-harness design pattern for notebook-native infrastructure. A thin system adapter supplies backend-specific operations, while a shared control layer enforces capability declarations, policy hooks, structured events, redacted errors, lifecycle telemetry, and metadata context. We show how the same contract supports data queries and managed compute without exposing credentials or binding users to backend-specific setup.

Attendees leave with an adapter interface, governance hooks, common event model, and conformance checklist they can reuse when adding the next data or compute system.