Schema Registry
Enforcing compatibility on events the way CI enforces it on code.
2 to work through
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intermediate
A platform's event streams have many producers and consumers across teams. Someone deploys a change that removes a field, and three downstream consumers fail overnight. What should have prevented this?
2 min answer -
intermediate Multiple choice
A team publishes events to a topic read by many independent consumers. They need to add a field with no default value to the event schema. Which registry compatibility mode permits that, and what is the mode really constraining?
2 min answer
4 terms in this topic
Compatibility Mode
The registry setting that defines which schema changes are permitted — backward, forward, full, or none — and therefore what upgrade order is safe.
conceptDeployment Order Coupling
The constraint that a schema compatibility mode really expresses - which side of an interface must be upgraded first - rather than any statement abou…
toolSchema Registry
A central service holding message schemas with enforced compatibility rules, so a producer cannot publish a change that breaks its consumers.
conceptSubject Naming Strategy
How schemas are keyed in a registry — per topic, per record type, or both — which determines whether one topic may carry several event types.
Neighbouring topics
API & Integration
General material on integrating systems through contracts.
REST Design
Resources, uniform methods, status codes and statelessness.
GraphQL
Client-specified queries, N+1 resolution and query-cost control.
gRPC APIs
Contract-first RPC, generated clients and protobuf compatibility rules.
Webhooks
Push callbacks, signature verification, ordering and at-least-once delivery.
API Versioning
URL, header and account-pinned versioning, and who carries the burden.
Backward Compatibility
Which changes are safe, and how to make breakage a build failure.
Contract Testing
Verifying what consumers actually rely on, without a shared environment.
API Documentation
OpenAPI as a machine-checked contract rather than as prose.
Rate Limiting
Algorithms, shared counters, and signalling rejection properly.
Idempotency Keys
Client-generated keys stored atomically with the operation they guard.
Pagination & Filtering
Offset versus cursor, stable ordering and unbounded result sets.
API Error Handling
Error shapes, retryability signals and machine-readable causes.
Event-Driven Integration
Publishing facts rather than commands, and versioning event schemas.
Message Formats
JSON, Protobuf, Avro — schema evolution and payload economics.
Integration Patterns
Routers, translators, splitters, aggregators and dead letter channels.
Legacy Integration
Reaching systems that cannot change, without importing their model.
Partner & B2B Integration
External contracts, onboarding, sandboxes and long deprecation windows.
APIs as Products
Ownership, lifecycle, deprecation policy and developer experience.