With Apache Kafka’s rise for event-driven architectures, developers require a specification to design effective event-driven APIs. AsyncAPI has been developed based on OpenAPI to define the endpoints and schemas of brokers and topics. For Kafka applications, the broker’s design to handle high throughput serialized payloads brings challenges for consumers and producers managing the structure of the message. For this reason, a registry becomes critical to achieve schema governance. Apicurio Registry is an end-to-end solution to store API definitions and schemas for Kafka applications. The project includes serializers, deserializers, and additional tooling. The registry supports several types of artifacts including OpenAPI, AsyncAPI, GraphQL, Apache Avro, Google protocol buffers, JSON Schema, Kafka Connect schema, WSDL, and XML Schema (XSD). It also checks them for validity and compatibility. In this session, we will be covering the following topics: ● The importance of having a contract-first approach to event-driven APIs ● What is AsyncAPI, and how it helps to define Kafka endpoints and schemas ● The Kafka challenges on message structure when serializing and deserializing ● Introduction to Apicurio Registry and schema management for Kafka ● Examples of how to use Apicurio Registry with popular Java frameworks like Spring and Quarkus
