Data engineering·Orchestration and running it in anger
the producer registers the schema and gets an id, and the consumer looks that id up rather than guessing at the payload.
Schema registry
Also calledschema store, subject registry
A service holding the versioned schemas for messages on a stream, with rules about which changes are allowed. It is what makes a binary format like Avro workable at scale: payloads carry an id rather than field names, and compatibility is checked at registration rather than discovered at consumption. Its usefulness collapses entirely if producers can register incompatible versions, so the compatibility mode is the setting that matters.