Within any organization, API producers and consumers need to stay in sync about the schemas that will be used for communication among them. Especially as the number of APIs and related producers and consumers grow in the organization, what may start with simply passing around schemas among teams will start to hit scaling challenges. Faced with this issue, some of our teams have turned to Apicurio Registry, an open-source, centralized registry for various types of schemas and API artifacts, including OpenAPI specifications and Protobuf and Avro schemas. Apicurio Registry allows users to interact with it through a UI as well as a REST API and a Maven plugin. It also has the option to enforce schema evolution restrictions, such as backward compatibility. Moreover, when it comes to working with Kafka clients, Apicurio Registry is compatible with Confluent Schema Registry. While our teams have found Confluent Schema Registry's documentation more helpful, Apicurio Registry meets their needs for a source of truth for various schemas.
