Error Handling in Kafka Streams: Overview

Mistakes are a part of life, and errors in software are no different. Our Kafka Streams application will encounter errors at some point, and we will have to deal with these errors somehow.

By default, a Kafka Streams application will shut down on any uncaught exception. This is sensible when we are developing the application but very bad for running production applications. We rarely want our entire application to shut down just because we forgot to catch an exception or a transient external error has occurred.

Luckily, the Kafka Streams library does not leave us empty handed when it comes to error handling. There are three categories for errors in a Kafka Streams application: entry, processing, and exit.