Interactive Queries

The data stored in Kafka Streams state stores could potentially be used outside the context of the applications. We could save it in an external database to be queried using a different application or microservice, but Kafka Streams provides us with an easier and faster solution: interactive queries.

Interactive queries allow us to query state stores and expose the results, usually through a REST API. We will run a simple stateful topology with a reduce operator, which concatenates received records to a single sentence by the record’s key.

Then, we will expose a REST endpoint that will retrieve values from the state store associated with the reduce operator by key.

We will be using the following code to start: