Companies are increasingly adopting Karapace, an open-source alternative to Confluent Schema Registry and REST API for Apache Kafka®, started by Aiven. The software handles the distribution and evolution of schemas outside a Kafka cluster. Aiven created Karapace in response to licensing changes in Confluent Schema Registry back in 2018, aiming to provide an open-source alternative for all Apache Kafka users. Aiven is committed to continuing the development of Karapace and ensuring compatibility between Confluent Schema Registry and Karapace. The collaboration with Instaclustr has further strengthened the future of Karapace by adding support for the Google Protocol Buffer (Protobuf) format in the Karapace schema registry, which allows cross-language support for code generation.