Using the vanilla kafka producer, I can write protobuf messages to kafka while leveraging schema registry support as well. A flink kafka producer requires us to explicity provide a serializer which converts the message to a producerrecord containing the serialized bytes of the message. We can't make use of the KafkaProtoobufSerializer[T] provided by Confluent. Thus the only way I could think of would be to create an instance of KafkaProtobufSerializer inside a FlinkSerializationSchema class and use it to serialize my messages. The problem with that would be that I would have to implement registration of the schema and other tasks done by KafkaProtobufSerializer.
Is there any other way to solve this problem? Is there a plan to support protobuf serialization along with schema registry support? I noticed you've recently added Avro + Schema Registry support to your codebase but haven't documented it. Is it ready for use?
