Description
The current default "default serde" is not particularly useful, and in almost all cases is intended to be overwritten either by setting the config explicitly or by specifying serdes directly in the topology. If a user does not set the config and misses specifying a serde they will get a runtime ClassCastException once they start processing unless they are in fact processing only bytes.
We should change the default default to null, so that an exception will instead be thrown immediately on startup if a user failed to specify a serde somewhere in their topology and it falls back to the unset default.
KIP-741: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/KIP-741%3A+Change+default+serde+to+be+null
high.lee Just to clarify – this ticket implies a backward incompatible change, and thus we cannot do it before 3.0 release. There is no timeline for a 3.0 major version bump atm – hence, we cannot really work on this ticket atm.