The text discusses the importance of data governance in event-driven microservices architecture. It highlights how Apache Kafka and Confluent Cloud can help achieve this through explicit agreements between producers and consumers, formalizing a data contract that includes schema, integrity constraints, metadata, security, and evolution. The text explains how Confluent Schema Registry provides a centralized location to catalog, organize, validate, and track the evolution of data contracts. It also introduces migration rules, which enable UPGRADE and DOWNGRADE transformations between schema versions, allowing for seamless changes in event format without breaking data consistency. The text concludes by highlighting the benefits of this approach, including improved scalability, modularity, and future-proofing, as well as enhanced autonomy for individual services within a microservices architecture.