Use Case 1: Registering and Querying a Schema for a Kafka Topic
When Kafka is integrated into enterprise organization deployments, you typically have many different Kafka topics used by different apps and users. With the adoption of Kafka within the enterprise, some key questions that often come up are the following:
What are the different events in a given Kafka topic?
What do I put into a given Kafka topic?
Do all Kafka events have a similar type of schema?
How do I parse and use the data in a given Kafka topic?
While Kafka topics do not have a schema, having an external store that tracks this metadata for a given Kafka topic helps to answer these common questions. Schema Registry addresses this use case.
One important point to note is that Schema Registry is not just a metastore for Kafka. Schema Registry was designed to be generic schema store for any type of entity or store (log files, or similar.)