Karapace on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS

Overview

Karapace is an open source implementation of the Schema Registry and Kafka REST Proxy APIs. The registry gives your event streams a central, versioned contract: producers and consumers store Avro, JSON Schema and Protobuf schemas under a subject, every schema keeps its own version history, and the registry checks each proposed change against a compatibility rule so a breaking change is caught before it reaches production rather than after a consumer has already failed on it. The REST proxy exposes the same cluster over plain HTTP, so any client that can make a web request can list topics, produce messages and consume them without a native Kafka driver.

Because it implements the same APIs as the widely used Confluent equivalents, existing client libraries and tooling point at it unchanged. It suits teams standardising the contracts between services on Kafka, anyone who needs schema governance and compatibility enforcement they host themselves, and applications in languages with no first class Kafka client that still need to read and write events over HTTP.

Common uses

• Enforce Avro, JSON Schema and Protobuf contracts across Kafka producers and consumers
• Catch breaking schema changes with compatibility checks before they reach production
• Produce to and consume from Kafka over plain HTTP with no native client