Data Serialization & Encoding

Data Serialization & Encoding#

At 3am, a pipeline at a mid-sized fintech company went silent. No errors at first, just missing data. The culprit: a backend team had added a new required field to their event schema, pushed it to production, and the downstream Kafka consumer, expecting the old Avro schema, couldn't deserialize a single message. By the time anyone noticed, six hours of transaction events had piled up unprocessed.