In modern distributed systems, event-driven architectures have become mainstream. While RESTful APIs have well-established design-first practices with OpenAPI/Swagger, event-driven architectures often lack similar standardization. For any team building event-driven systems (in general) with Kafka, the initial promise of decoupling and resilience can quickly be overshadowed by chaos. Without a contract, producers and consumers drift apart, leading to runtime errors, documentation nightmares, and endless debates over topic names and message schemas. AsyncAPI aims to solve these challenges, but its current tooling ecosystem has gaps, particularly for .NET developers working with Kafka, Schema Registry, and Infrastructure as Code practices.
This article shares an opinionated path of bridging this gap by creating a custom AsyncAPI template that generates production-ready Kafka clients in C#.