Schema Registry Best Practices

This post details best practices for using Confluent Schema Registry, including understanding schema IDs, subjects, and versions. It elaborates on data contracts, emphasizing structure, integrity constraints, metadata, rules/policies, and change/evolution. The post recommends pre-registering schemas via CI/CD or REST APIs and enabling schema normalization for interoperability. It advocates for the topic-based subject name strategy with union types and schema composition using schema references. Subject aliases are introduced for flexible subject naming. The post thoroughly explains compatibility levels (backward, forward, full) and their implications, recommending backward compatibility as the default and discussing how to handle compatibility checks and potential issues with open content models.