Instaclustr is pleased to announce the immediate availability of a new Kafka add-on, Karapace Schema Registry, in public preview, on our managed platform. This follows our earlier announcement of Karapace as part of our comprehensive Apache Kafka support solutions in mid March. We chose to implement support for Karapace as, being licensed under Apache 2.0, it offers our customers a purely open-source alternative to proprietary solutions and comes with all the accompanying benefits, most importantly, no vendor lock-in.

In a short span of time since it came into existence, Karapace has become a viable one-to-one replacement for Confluent’s Schema Registry and REST Proxy for the vast majority of use cases. For example, Karapace Schema Registry is already compatible with Confluent Schema Registry 6.1.1 on the API level. With an active community of individual and institutional contributors, including Instaclustr, it continues to evolve and overtake similar solutions in stability, scope and functionality. We believe it is the right option moving forward for a significant majority, if not all, of our customers.

We encourage you to try it in your non-production environments. Steps to help you get started are available on our support website here. Please note that public preview releases are not covered by our SLAs and are not recommended for production purposes. 

The generally available release, expected to be released within the coming weeks, in addition to some enhancements to Karapace Schema Registry will contain Karapace REST Proxy and more comprehensive support documentation.

We welcome any feedback you might have on this public preview release. Please feel free to send it over to us via our support website or our customer success team.