What is the main purpose of a schema registry in an event-driven system?
A schema registry (e.g., Confluent Schema Registry) lets producers register schemas and consumers validate incoming messages against them. It prevents format mismatches from breaking consumers when producers evolve.
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A schema change is backward compatible if:
Backward compatibility means: you can update the producer (deploy new schema) without updating consumers. Old consumers can still deserialise new messages. Typically achieved by only adding optional fields with defaults.
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Which statement correctly describes forward compatibility?
Forward compatibility means: you can update consumers (new schema) before producers. Old producer messages can still be read by new consumers — achieved by consumers ignoring unknown fields and having defaults for new required fields.
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Avro is commonly used as an event schema format because:
Avro's binary encoding is compact and efficient. Combined with a schema registry, Avro messages include only a schema ID (not the full schema) — consumers fetch the schema to deserialise. This balance of efficiency and schema governance makes it popular for Kafka.
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Before deploying, the team says: "Validate that your schema change is backward-compatible." Which change would break backward compatibility?
Removing a field breaks backward compatibility — old consumers that expect the field will fail to deserialise new messages. Safe changes include: adding optional fields with defaults, adding new types (unused by old consumers).