Chapter 12. Validating schemas with the Red Hat build of Apicurio Registry

You can use the Red Hat build of Apicurio Registry with Streams for Apache Kafka.

Apicurio Registry is a datastore for sharing standard event schemas and API designs across API and event-driven architectures. You can use Apicurio Registry to decouple the structure of your data from your client applications, and to share and manage your data types and API descriptions at runtime using a REST interface.

Apicurio Registry stores schemas used to serialize and deserialize messages, which can then be referenced from your client applications to ensure that the messages that they send and receive are compatible with those schemas. Apicurio Registry provides Kafka client serializers/deserializers for Kafka producer and consumer applications. Kafka producer applications use serializers to encode messages that conform to specific event schemas. Kafka consumer applications use deserializers, which validate that the messages have been serialized using the correct schema, based on a specific schema ID.

You can enable your applications to use a schema from the registry. This ensures consistent schema usage and helps to prevent data errors at runtime.