Confluent Schema References

Factor House release v93.3 brings full support for schema references in Confluent Schema Registry.

With this new release you can now create and edit AVRO, JSONSchema, and Protobuf schema with references, as well as consume and produce messages with those schema.

This release also includes improved general performance by removing producer and transaction observation, improved visualisation of Kafka Streams, consumer group, and Flink topologies, a better responsive UI for smaller screens, along with plenty of minor bugfixes.

Confluent Schema Registry References

Confluent schema registry provides support for the notion of schema references, the ability of a schema to refer to other schemas.

Each implementation is slightly different depending on the source format, but broadly speaking you can pass a json payload when creating and editing schema that defines precisely how to resolve referenced schema in the registry. See the Confluent documentation on schema references for more information.

Kpow now provides full support for managing schema references when creating and editing schema as well as producing and consuming messages with those schema.

General Performance Improvements

User feedback led us to understand that out approach to observing active producers and transactions in a Kafka cluster was performing sub-optimally. We have taken the decision to remove the recently introduced Producers UI in the short-term while we reconsider this piece of work.

Improved Kafka Streams, Consumer, and Flink Topology Viz

As we move towards the launch of the Factor Platform - our Unified Platform for Data in Motion - some UI improvements are finding their way into Kpow and Flex.

Flink topology viewing just got a lot easier on the eye!