Have you ever struggled with managing data long term, especially as the schema changes over time? In order to manage and leverage data across an organization, it’s essential to have well-defined guidelines and standards in place around data quality, enforcement, and data transfer. To get started, Abraham Leal (Customer Success Technical Architect, Confluent) suggests that organizations associate their Apache Kafka data with a data contract (schema). A data contract is an agreement between a service provider and data consumers. It defines the management and intended usage of data within an organization. In this episode, Abraham talks to Kris about how to use data contracts and schema enforcement to ensure long-term data management.

Confluent Platform 5.5 introduces long-awaited JSON Schema and Protobuf support in Confluent Schema Registry and across other platform components.

Tim Berglund and Magesh Nandakumar discuss why schemas matter for building systems on Apache Kafka®, and how Confluent Schema Registry helps with the problem. They talk about how Schema Registry works, how you can collaborate around schema change through `avsc` files, and what it means for this to be available in Confluent Cloud today.