Instaclustr is pleased to announce the general availability of Kafka add-ons, Karapace Schema Registry, and Karapace REST Proxy on our managed platform.

This follows our earlier announcement of Karapace as part of our comprehensive Apache Kafka® support solutions in mid-March, followed by our release of Karapace Schema Registry in Public Preview. Compared to the Public Preview release, the GA comes with the following notable changes:

• Karapace REST Proxy version 3.2.0 is now supported
• Integration of Karapace REST Proxy with local Karapace Schema Registry is supported
• Karapace Schema Registry received a version bump from 2.1.2 to 3.2.0

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 the short period 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 recently contributed the Protobuf implementation to the Karapace project, and are currently working on providing support for schema references (with plans for continuing support for additional features beneficial for our customers). Given this, we believe Karapace is the right option moving forward for a significant majority, if not all, of our customers.

Please note, our Enterprise Features and Enterprise Add-Ons attract an additional charge of 20% on top of the node cost for the first such feature or add-on enabled by you. 

For our existing customers with clusters enabled with Kafka Schema Registry, we’ve ensured migrating to Karapace will be a quick and straightforward exercise. Please open a support ticket and we’ll get back to you with the details and provide any assistance you need.

For new and existing customers, we recommend you try the add-ons in a non-production environment and get in touch with us via our support website should you need any help. Steps to help you get started are available on our support website for Karapace Schema Registry and Karapace REST Proxy.