First Look at Apicurio Service Registry UI and Operator

The Apicurio community launched last year the new Apicurio Registry project targeted as an API and schema registry for services. It allows you to store and retrieve service artifacts. For example, OpenAPI specification and AsyncAPI definitions as well as Avro, JSON, and Google protocol buffer schemas. This registry also works as a catalog, allowing you to navigate through the artifacts. Consequently, having an user interface was a vital feature that needed to be added. 

The latest 1.2.2 release added the new web-based user interface to the project. The release is now available as a binary download as well as container images. In fact, to make it easier to set up and manage the deployment of the solution on Kubernetes, there is now a new Kubernetes Operator available for the Apicurio Registry.

User Interface

The new web-based user interface allows you to navigate through the different artifacts stored in the registry. There you can search artifacts by labels, name, or description. It also includes the option to preview the content of the artifact, and a download option in case you want to store it locally. Additionally, you can check all the versions available. 

In addition to browsing through the artifacts, the interface also allows you to configure and manage the content rules both globally and per-artifact.

Of course, it is also possible to upload new artifacts and update existing artifacts with new content versions.

You can access the user interface by navigating to the main endpoint of your deployment, like http://localhost:8080/ and it will redirect you to the /ui path. 

Kubernetes Operator

The Kubernetes operator allows you to quickly install and configure the service registry. You can deploy the operator in a working Kubernetes or OpenShift cluster. You can install it through the deployment quickstart available in the GitHub repository and in the future it will be available in the operatorhub.io catalog. 

After installation, you can create an ApicurioRegistry resource like the in-memory example with the required configuration so the operator can deploy it in your cluster. You can define things like the persistence type and the ingress route configuration to expose it externally.

The operator is still in development, but you can try it and provide feedback to the team. 

Summary

The Apicurio community is enhancing its component ecosystem. As an example, the Registry and Operators make it easier to discover, manage and work with service specifications and artifacts. Not only for request-response synchronous APIs, but also for asynchronous and event-driven architectures. Red Hat Integration provides a Technical Preview support of the service registry to help teams to govern their services schemas and as a drop-in replacement for the Confluent Schema Registry.