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Schema Registry allows us to control how schemas can be evolved through time without breaking compatibility. However, when using high retention, you could end up with a convoluted “dirty” schema depending on the selected compatibility level, as well as many different models in your application logic to support all the schema versions.
Upcaster chains allow you to read an old version of a message and bring it to what your logic needs today. The upcasters in the chain describe how to jump from one version to the next. They describe what your logic expects instead of covering all the possible variations that were ever published.
We created an upcaster registry to allow you to declare upcasters and their chains in a declarative manner allowing them to be used across all your streaming apps. It is a great combo with Schema Registry; one providing the schemas themselves, the other expressing how to evolve from one schema version to the next.