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Setup Guide

This guide walks you through enabling the Confluent Schema Registry on Confluent Cloud and obtaining the credentials required to use the Confluent Avro SerDes connector.

Prerequisites​

  • A Confluent Cloud account. If you do not have one, sign up for a free trial.
  • An active Confluent Cloud environment with a Kafka cluster created.

Step 1: Enable schema registry for your environment​

Confluent Cloud provides one Schema Registry per environment. To enable it:

  1. Log in to Confluent Cloud.
  2. In the left navigation, select Environments and click your target environment.
  3. On the environment page, locate the Schema Registry panel on the right side.
  4. Click Enable Schema Registry (if not already active) and select the cloud provider and region closest to your Kafka cluster.
  5. Click Enable.
note

Schema Registry is enabled per environment, not per cluster. All clusters in the same environment share the same Schema Registry endpoint.

Step 2: Retrieve the schema registry endpoint URL​

  1. In Confluent Cloud, navigate to your environment.

  2. In the Schema Registry panel on the right side of the environment page, copy the Endpoint URL. It follows the format:

    https://<region>.<cloud-provider>.confluent.cloud

This is the baseUrl you will use when initializing the cregistry:Client.

Step 3: Create schema registry API keys​

  1. In the Schema Registry panel on the environment page, click View & manage schemas or navigate to Schema Registry > API Keys.
  2. Click Add key (or + Add API key).
  3. Select the appropriate access level:
    • Global access: grants read/write access to all subjects.
    • Granular access: restricts to specific subjects or operations.
  4. Click Next, then click Download and continue to save your API key and secret. Store these securely: the secret is shown only once.
tip

Store the API key and secret securely. Use Ballerina's configurable feature and a Config.toml file to supply them at runtime rather than hard-coding them in your source.

Step 4: Configure schema registry authentication properties​

The cregistry:Client accepts authentication details through the originals map using standard Confluent Schema Registry client properties. Set the following keys in your originals configuration:

Property keyValue
schema.registry.urlYour Schema Registry endpoint URL
basic.auth.credentials.sourceUSER_INFO
schema.registry.basic.auth.user.info<API_KEY>:<API_SECRET> (colon-separated)

In your Config.toml, supply these as a TOML inline table under the originals key.

note

If you are using a self-hosted Confluent Platform Schema Registry without authentication, you can omit the basic.auth.credentials.source and schema.registry.basic.auth.user.info properties and provide only schema.registry.url.