Spring Boot: Motivation and Overview

Spring Boot is a Java-based framework designed to simplify the development of production-ready applications by providing default configurations and conventions. It streamlines the setup of Spring applications, allowing developers to focus on writing business logic rather than handling infrastructure concerns.

When it comes to developing Kafka Streams applications, integrating them with Spring Boot offers several advantages that can significantly enhance our development experience. Spring Boot simplifies and streamlines many aspects of building Kafka Streams applications.

If you’re familiar and comfortable with using Spring Boot, then building Kafka Streams applications with it is a very good choice. If you are less familiar with Spring Boot, we’ll discuss the advantages and briefly learn some basic terms below.

Life cycle management and abstraction

Kafka Streams applications involve managing the life cycle of Kafka Streams instances. Spring Boot abstracts and takes care of this by providing built-in life cycle management, ensuring that Kafka Streams instances are properly started, stopped, and managed.

This is how a non-Spring Boot application would define a topology and start a stream: