Kafka Streams in Action, Second Edition

3 Schema Registry

This chapter covers

• Using bytes means serialization rules
• What a schema is and why you need to use one
• What Schema Registry is
• Ensuring compatibility with changes—schema evolution
• Understanding subject names
• Reusing schemas with references

In chapter 2, you learned about the heart of the Kafka streaming platform, the Kafka broker. In particular, you learned how the broker is the storage layer appending incoming messages to a topic, serving as an immutable, distributed log of events. A topic represents the directory containing the log file(s).

Since the producers send messages over the network, they must be serialized first into binary format, an array of bytes. The Kafka broker does not change the messages in any ...