What is the role of the Confluent Schema Registry in a Kafka ecosystem, and how does it enforce compatibility?

• A. It stores and serves schemas for Avro/JSON/Protobuf; enforces compatibility rules (BACKWARD, FORWARD, FULL) for producer/consumer compatibility and schema evolution.
• B. It stores data in topics; enforces retention policies.
• C. It provides a UI for monitoring topics; enforces ACLs.
• D. It compiles Java code to bytecode; enforces type safety.

Answer: (D)