0012. Use Apicurio Registry for event schemas¶
- Status: Accepted
- Date: 2026-09-26
Context¶
Events cross team and service boundaries; a malformed or silently changed event in the order flow is an incident. Schemas must be versioned, compatibility-checked and enforced at produce time.
Options¶
| Option | License | Pros | Cons |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apicurio Registry | Apache-2.0 | Avro/Protobuf/JSON Schema, compatibility rules, Confluent-compatible API | Fewer tutorials |
| Confluent Schema Registry | Confluent Community License | De-facto standard | Not OSI open source |
| Karapace | Apache-2.0 | Confluent API compatible | Smaller project |
Decision¶
Use Apicurio Registry with backward-compatibility rules enforced per subject. The serialization format (Avro vs Protobuf) is decided with the event model in Phase 4.
Consequences¶
- Schema evolution becomes a reviewed change with compatibility checks.
- Schemas can carry data-classification metadata (PII tags) for governance.