xRegistry: A Universal Model for Metadata Registries
Shriira Press
A single, vendor-neutral way to catalog, version, and discover the metadata that holds distributed systems together.
Welcome to xRegistry: A Universal Model for Metadata Registries.
Modern systems are knit together by metadata: the schemas that describe a payload, the definitions that declare an event, the endpoints that say where a stream lives. That metadata tends to scatter across wikis, vendor consoles, and tribal memory, so every integration starts with a hunt for the truth. xRegistry is a CNCF specification, born in the same Serverless Working Group that produced CloudEvents, that proposes one abstract model and one REST API for all of it. Everything is a registry containing groups, which hold resources, which carry versions, and the API and the document format mirror each other exactly so the same data can be a live service or a file on disk. This book walks that model from the ground up: the problem it solves and where it came from, the four-level hierarchy and its attributes, the symmetric API and document forms, how versioning and optimistic concurrency work, how you define your own registry shapes, the three standard registries for schemas, messages, and endpoints, and how teams put it to work for discovery and code generation. By the end you will read an xRegistry URL like a sentence and know how to model your own metadata in it.
This title is part of the ShriIra library and is free to read in full, right here — our small contribution to making world-class knowledge easy to reach.
A note on reading it: open the Contents menu at the top of the reader to jump between chapters, use the Aa menu to set a comfortable text size, theme (light, sepia, or night), and single- or two-page layout. Your place is saved automatically, so you can always pick up where you left off.
We hope it serves you well.
— Shriira Press