Managing Schemas in Kafka

On the inside, Kafka is schemaless, but there is nothing schemaless about the worlds we live in. Our languages impose type systems, and the objects in our business domains have fixed sets of properties and semantics that must be obeyed. Pretending that we can operate without competent schema management does us no good at all.

In this talk, we’ll explore our how the different parts of the open-source Kafka ecosystem help us manage schema, from KSQL’s data format opinions to the full power of the Confluent Schema Registry. We will examine the Schema Registry’s operations in some detail, how it handles schema migrations, and look at examples of client code that makes proper use of it. You’ll leave this talk seeing that schema is not just an inconvenience that must be remedied, but a key means of collaboration around an enterprise-wide streaming platform.