If you’re familiar with Apache Kafka®, then you might have encountered a Kafka-compatible schema registry—a separate component that you deploy outside of your Kafka cluster, since Kafka itself doesn’t have one built-in.
Essentially, a schema is a logical description of how your data is organized, and so a schema registry provides a central repository for those schemas, allowing producers and consumers to seamlessly send and receive data between them. For event-driven architectures, this can become complex and difficult to manage as you scale, since data schemas can change and evolve over time (potentially breaking things down the line).