The text discusses the challenges of managing schemas in big data projects, particularly in Hadoop and NoSQL systems. The author shares their experience working on Data Warehouse Offloading projects and how they had to implement a schema management system to enable different teams to use the same data for their applications and analysis. The author highlights the importance of having a shared repository of all schemas used by an organization to make siloed knowledge shared and explicit. They also discuss the benefits of using a schema registry, including enabling stream processing pipelines, improving developer efficiency, and providing a way to load results into HBase or Impala. The text concludes that Confluent's stream data platform includes a Schema Registry as a first-class application, which is crucial for building production-ready data pipelines.