We are excited to announce the release of Apicurio Registry 3.3.0! This is a major feature release that introduces Data Contracts support, a completely revamped CLI experience, Kubernetes Operator improvements, and much more. Read on for the highlights.

Data Contracts

The headline feature of 3.3.0 is the introduction of Data Contracts — a comprehensive framework for defining, enforcing, and governing the quality and structure of your data artifacts.

ODCS (Open Data Contract Standard) Support

Apicurio Registry now supports the Open Data Contract Standard v3.1, including a full parser, a projection engine for extracting relevant views from contracts, REST API endpoints for managing contracts, the ability to export contracts from existing artifacts, and first-class artifact type registration.

Tags

A new tagging system allows metadata to be automatically extracted from your schemas. Tag extractors are available for Avro, JSON Schema, and Protobuf, with a pluggable SPI so you can add your own. Tags are stored alongside artifacts and are fully queryable through the API.

Contract Rules and Governance

Data contracts can now include rules that define quality and governance constraints. A new CEL (Common Expression Language) Rule Executor allows you to write powerful, flexible rules that are evaluated at runtime. The governance rule type provides a structured way to enforce organizational policies around data quality.

Quality Score and Promotion Workflow

A built-in Quality Score Calculator evaluates artifacts against their contract rules and produces a score, giving you a quantitative measure of data quality. Combined with the new Promotion Workflow, you can define stage gates that artifacts must pass through — for example, requiring a minimum quality score before an artifact can be promoted from draft to production.

Contract REST API

All of this is exposed through dedicated Contract REST API endpoints, complete with metadata models and label conventions for consistent organization.

CLI

The Apicurio Registry CLI has been significantly enhanced in this release, graduating from its initial MVP to a fully-featured management tool.

New Capabilities

  • Search — Find groups, artifacts, and versions directly from the command line
  • Full CRUD management — Create, read, update, and delete groups, artifacts, versions, and rules (global, group-level, and artifact-level)
  • Version comments — Add and manage comments on artifact versions
  • Context management — Create, update, and switch between CLI contexts for managing multiple registry instances
  • Draft content updates — Update the content of draft versions directly
  • Authentication — Support for both Basic auth and OAuth2

Quality of Life

  • Automatic updates with OS and architecture detection
  • Verbose mode now properly controls Quarkus/JBoss logging output
  • Improved error handling with simplified ProblemDetails and proper RuleViolationProblemDetails support
  • Internal conversion to CDI for better modularity

Operator Improvements

The Apicurio Registry Operator now supports Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) for both the application and UI deployments, making it easier to scale your registry in Kubernetes environments. Additionally, the operator now auto-creates RBAC resources when using KubernetesOps storage, simplifying deployment configuration.

UI Improvements

The Registry UI now supports adding artifact references when registering new artifacts or versions, making it possible to define schema hierarchies directly from the web interface.

MCP Tool Definition Artifact Type

A new MCP Tool Definition artifact type has been added, allowing you to store and manage Model Context Protocol tool definitions as first-class artifacts in the registry. This further extends our AI-native capabilities.

API Lifecycle Governance

This release introduces API Lifecycle Governance capabilities covering deprecation management, consumer tracking, and impact analysis. This gives you visibility into who is consuming your APIs and helps you manage the full lifecycle from introduction to retirement.

Bug Fixes

Several important bugs have been fixed in this release:

  • Confluent compatibility endpoint now correctly resolves versions by integer sequence number when artifacts use semantic versioning
  • Retry handler properly fires retries for HttpClosedException
  • Kafka topic cleanup policy documentation corrected
  • Fixed NullPointerException in JsonSchemaContentValidator when references are missing
  • Fixed Avro schema references to pre-defined enum types
  • Hardened Protobuf validation against malformed identifiers and conflicting FQNs
  • Various Confluent compatibility improvements identified by the compatibility harness

Try It Out

You can get started with Apicurio Registry 3.3.0 right away:

docker pull quay.io/apicurio/apicurio-registry:3.3.0
docker run -it -p 8080:8080 quay.io/apicurio/apicurio-registry:3.3.0

Check out the full release notes on GitHub.

As always, we welcome your feedback and contributions. Feel free to open an issue on GitHub or join the community discussion.