When a schema registry has failed, consumer or producer cannot read schema anymore. This means that the records stored in Kafka are no longer readable. In this case, an exception is thrown because the data is unreadable for the consumer.
Is there an alternative to implement when the schema registry fails so that the consumer and producer don't get an error?
Unclear what failure conditions you're referring to. Also, producers don't read topic data, only consumers.
If you're getting some HTTP client exception or the Registry is down, then the only alternative is to use a Serializer that doesn't require the registry.
For a consumer, you can always use the ByteArrayDeserializer to bypass any Schema Registry connection and manually deserialize the data with some schema information as part of the consumer application
