What JSON is
JSON is a text format for nested data: objects with named keys, arrays, strings, numbers, booleans and null. It has no date type and no comments.
Every web API, most configuration files and anything that talks to JavaScript.
What Avro Schema is
An Avro schema describes a record: its name and its typed fields. It is the contract, not the data.
Kafka pipelines and anything in the Hadoop family.
What changes when you convert JSON to Avro Schema
Four shapes all read correctly: an array of objects, an array of arrays with a header row, an object of column arrays, and an object keyed by row id. A single wrapper key holding the array, which is how most APIs reply, is unwrapped automatically. Nested objects are flattened one level into dotted keys; anything deeper is kept as JSON text in the cell, because a table cannot hold a tree.
Types are inferred per column from the values present. Any column with a gap in it becomes a union with null, because a reader rejects a record whose non-nullable field is missing.
What carries over from JSON to Avro Schema
Avro can express everything JSON holds about a table, so this conversion is about shape rather than loss.
The result can be read a record at a time, and appended to by adding to the end of it. That is worth having for a table too large to hold in memory, and it means a Avro file that is cut off part way through still gives you every record before the cut.
Both formats record types, so numbers, booleans and nulls survive as themselves rather than as text.