Expanding User Profile Schema for a New Feature

Problem/Feature Description

The platform engineering team at Acme Corp manages a high-volume Kafka topic called user-profiles that streams user profile update events to dozens of downstream consumers — recommendation engines, audit loggers, and analytics dashboards. The topic currently uses an Avro schema with three fields: user_id (int), username (string), and email (string). All consumers and producers are deployed and actively processing live data.

A new product initiative requires adding a phone_number field and a preferred_language field to the user profile schema so that the notification service can personalize delivery. Not all users have a phone number or preferred language on file, so these fields are optional. The data-platform team needs to evolve this schema safely without disrupting any running consumers, and without violating the existing compatibility mode configured for this subject. The team also needs to produce a runnable shell script that captures the entire migration workflow so that it can be reviewed, version-controlled, and re-run in other environments.

Output Specification

Produce the following files:

• v2_schema.json — The updated Avro schema (version 2) with the new optional fields added correctly.
• evolve.sh — A self-contained bash script that carries out the complete schema evolution process. The script must:
  • Check whether the new schema is compatible with the current registered schema before attempting to register it.
  • Register the new schema if compatibility is confirmed.
  • Verify the registration by retrieving the latest version.
  • Print the recommended service deployment order given the compatibility mode in use.
• deploy_order.txt — A short text file stating which service type (consumers or producers) should be updated first after the schema is registered, and why.

Input Files

The following files are provided as inputs. Extract them before beginning.

=============== FILE: inputs/current_schema.json =============== { "type": "record", "name": "UserProfile", "namespace": "com.acme.profiles", "fields": [ {"name": "user_id", "type": "int"}, {"name": "username", "type": "string"}, {"name": "email", "type": "string"} ] } =============== END FILE ===============

=============== FILE: inputs/registry_info.txt =============== Schema Registry URL: http://localhost:8081 Subject: user-profiles-value Compatibility mode: BACKWARD =============== END FILE ===============