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Integrate Azure Schema Registry with EventCatalog

· 4 min read
David Boyne
David Boyne
Founder of EventCatalog

I'm happy to announce the release of the EventCatalog Azure Schema Registry plugin. This plugin allows you to import schemas from Azure Schema Registry into EventCatalog and keep them in sync alongside your documentation.

Importing your schemas into EventCatalog gives you the ability to:

In this blog post I'll walk you through the features of the plugin and how to get started.

What is Azure Schema Registry?​

Azure Schema Registry is a feature of Azure Event Hubs that provides a centralized repository for managing schemas in event-driven and message-based architectures. For architects building on Azure, Schema Registry offers a managed solution for schema validation, versioning, and governance.

Why integrate Azure Schema Registry with EventCatalog?​

EventCatalog helps organizations understand and manage their event-driven architectures by providing comprehensive documentation of domains, services, and messages.

While schema registries capture the technical contract of your events, EventCatalog preserves the crucial context often lost in traditional documentation: ownership details, business context, schema evolution history, and visual representations of your message flows.

The Azure Schema Registry plugin creates a seamless connection between your Azure Schema Registry and EventCatalog, giving you the best of both worlds.

You maintain all the powerful features of Azure's schema management while enriching your developer experience with EventCatalog's visualization capabilities, detailed documentation, governance tools, and enhanced discoverability.

This integration helps teams not just track what schemas exist, but understand how they fit into the broader architectural landscape and how they've evolved over time.

How the plugin works​

The Azure Schema Registry plugin maps your schemas into logical services and domains within your organization. Teams can configure which schemas each service produces or consumes, creating clear boundaries and relationships in your architecture.

When Azure schemas are imported into EventCatalog, they become more than just technical contracts - they gain rich contextual information that helps teams understand their broader impact. This includes crucial details like schema ownership, business context, and the producer-consumer relationships between services.

Any markdown and documentation added to your messages are persisted between versions, so you can add more value to your schemas and keep your documentation up-to-date.

Getting started​

To get started with the Azure Schema Registry integration, you'll need:

  • An Azure Event Hubs namespace with Schema Registry enabled
  • Schemas registered in your Azure Schema Registry
  • An EventCatalog license key for Azure Schema Registry integration (14-day free trial)

The setup takes just a few minutes. Read the installation guide to configure your integration, or explore the example project to see it in action.

Summary​

Azure Schema Registry is a powerful tool for managing schemas in event-driven architectures on Azure. We created our Azure Schema Registry integration to help you unlock more value from your schema registries.

The Azure Schema Registry plugin allows you to map your schemas to services and domains within your organization, helping your team understand how schemas are produced and consumed across your architecture.

EventCatalog syncs with your schema registry and persists any additional contextual information you add, including documentation, ownership, and relationships. This context carries forward as your schemas evolve, creating a living history of your event-driven architecture.

Using the Schema Explorer you can quickly find schemas in your architecture, and understand the history of your schemas, or connect your schemas to your LLMs with the EventCatalog MCP server.

Getting started should take just a few minutes and you can read our guide here.

If you have any questions you can join us on our Discord server.