Confluent schema registry provides a serving layer for your metadata to store and retrieve Avro schemas. Schema registry stores all the versions of Avro schemas based on a subject name strategy and provides multiple compatibility settings. Schema registry allows evolution of schemas according to the configured compatibility settings and expanded support for these schema types.

Schema registry provides Avro serializers and deserializers that Kafka Connector uses to handle schema storage and retrieval of Kafka messages in Avro format.

Schema registry is available separately from your Kafka brokers. The Kafka producers and consumers connect to Kafka to publish and read data from topics. Concurrently, the Kafka Connector connects to the schema registry to send and retrieve schemas that describe the data models for the Kafka messages.