Yes I know who Confluent is, and their open-source distribution already includes the schema registry and HTTP interface if you want it: https://www.confluent.io/product/compare/

Plenty of hosted Kafka providers these days, it's not that difficult to run and the advantage of Confluent as the original authors is really just marketing. They're also working on a Kafka operator (one of many in the market) to run it even easier on Kubernetes.