Airbyte Protocol standardizes source and destination actors for ELT pipelines

The docs state that the Airbyte Protocol is the single place for protocol rules: sources extract from data stores (databases, APIs, and similar), destinations load into data stores, and both are actors with standard interfaces. Key primitives are catalog, configured catalog, stream, configured stream, and field—where a stream describes a resource schema and a field is a column-like part of a stream.

Integration teams depend on that shared vocabulary so connectors compose without per-pair contracts. Choosing STDIO versus Socket mode is an operational detail; the semantic contract is still the catalog and stream model.

For governed meaning across pipelines, the protocol’s catalog and stream schemas are the handoff point between source semantics and destination tables. Treating those structures as data contracts keeps ELT aligned with upstream definitions instead of ad hoc mappings.

Anything not in this document (aside from the noted Supported Data Types exception) is outside the Protocol, which clarifies what agents and orchestrators may assume.