AWS Glue Schema Registry vs Redpanda

AWS Glue Schema Registry is a free cloud service for centrally discovering, controlling, and evolving schemas used by streaming applications. It supplies serializers and deserializers so producers and consumers can share schema definitions during data exchange. Supported formats are Avro v1.11.4, JSON Schema Draft-04, Draft-06, and Draft-07, plus Protocol Buffers proto2 and proto3; Protobuf extensions and groups are not supported. Eight compatibility modes are available: NONE, DISABLED, BACKWARD, BACKWARD_ALL, FORWARD, FORWARD_ALL, FULL, and FULL_ALL. Features include automatic registration, metadata-based schema sourcing, IAM compatibility, and optional ZLIB compression. Documented integrations cover Apache Kafka, Amazon MSK, Kinesis Data Streams, Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink, AWS Lambda, AWS Glue streaming, and Apache Kafka Streams. Client API traffic uses TLS over HTTPS, and schemas are encrypted at rest with an AWS KMS service-managed key. Registry ARNs organize permissions for schema operations.

Redpanda is an event-streaming platform for storing real-time events in ordered topics that can be replayed, with access through the Apache Kafka API. Its Kafka compatibility is intended to let existing applications and tools continue without rewrites or changes. The platform uses a native C++ architecture, runs as a single binary, and has no external dependencies. Redpanda Connect supplies more than 300 pre-built connectors for sources, sinks, processors, databases, APIs, cloud services, and AI pipelines. Native Apache Iceberg support and Iceberg topics let streams be materialized into lakehouse-ready tables. Deployment options include Serverless, managed BYOC on AWS, GCP, or Azure, and self-managed installations on bare metal, virtual machines, Kubernetes, or Docker. Redpanda also lists stream processing, a schema registry, both delivery guarantees, and client support for Java, C/C++, Go, Python, Rust, and Node.js. The maker states that its platform delivers 10x lower tail latencies than open-source Kafka.