The Confluent Schema Registry is crucial for effective communication between producers and consumers in a streaming platform by ensuring consistent schema usage, even as schemas evolve. As streaming becomes more prevalent, organizations are shifting responsibilities, such as data quality and transformation, to the data source, a process known as "shift-left," which emphasizes the use of data contracts. These contracts serve as formal agreements on data structure and semantics between upstream and downstream components, enhancing data transparency, reliability, and quality. The article provides an example of evolving a schema into a comprehensive data contract, illustrating steps like adding business metadata, data quality rules, and custom actions. It also discusses handling backward-incompatible schema changes using compatibility groups and migration rules with JSONata, highlighting the power of combining these elements for seamless schema evolution. The focus on data contracts allows for greater reliability in streaming, supported by the Confluent Schema Registry, which makes streaming more robust and dependable.