Since Confluent Platform version 5.5, Avro is no longer the only schema in town. Protobuf and JSON schemas are now supported as first-class citizens in Confluent universe. But before I go on explaining how to use Protobuf with Kafka, let’s answer one often-asked question:
Why Do We Need Schemas?
When applications communicate through a pub-sub system, they exchange messages and those messages need to be understood and agreed upon by all the participants in the communication. Additionally, you would like to detect and prevent changes to the message format that would make messages unreadable for some of the participants.