AI engineering glossary · Data engineering
What is avro?
Avro (also called Apache Avro): A compact, row-oriented binary format that stores the schema alongside the data and supports well-defined, controlled schema changes over time. It is widely used for messages on Kafka and for write-heavy ingestion.
Avro: an example
Each event published to a Kafka topic is serialised as Avro and validated against a registered schema.
Related terms
More Data engineering terms
- Backfill
- Backpressure
- Batch processing
- BigQuery
- Bucketing
- Change data capture
- Checkpointing
- Columnar storage
Where you learn it
Avro is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.