Expansion Plan

You work as an analyst at DeltaMart. Over the years, DeltaMart’s data volume has exploded : clickstream events, search logs, inventory updates, payments, delivery scans, and customer behavior signals now exceed 5 TB/day. Different teams face multiple issues in day-to-day tasks because:

1. Real-time metrics (orders/min, delivery delays) are unreliable (lags, inaccuracies, etc. have been observed)
2. Batch reports take hours to run
3. ML teams struggle with inconsistent historical data
4. No unified governance across domains

The technical lead has asked your team to design a next-generation data platform that can support real-time analytics, batch workloads, ML experimentation, and cross-team collaboration.

Identify the core architectural principles we should adopt when designing this new platform.

For each principle, explain briefly:

1. What the principle means?
2. How it would influence a specific design or technology choice?
3. What tradeoff it introduces?
4. How it helps DeltaMart scale without breaking?