Schema Evolution in Avro: The Hard Lessons from Production
Three months after deploying Kafka with Avro schemas and the Confluent Schema Registry, we had a production incident where a schema change caused a downstream consumer to silently produce incorrect output — wrong field values, no error thrown, no monitoring alert triggered. That incident rewired how the team thought about schema evolution. The tools don’t protect you from all the failure modes. Understanding the rules and building organisational processes around them is what does. ...