Spring Boot Tutorial 0/110 lessons ~6 min read Lesson 58“Production-grade backends”

Kafka Messaging

Apache Kafka is the durable, partitioned log behind every event-driven enterprise.

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Focus

3 guided sections

Practice signal

Examples included

Career prep

Foundation builder

Introduction

Apache Kafka is the durable, partitioned log behind every event-driven enterprise. Producers append to topics; consumers read at their own pace; Kafka stores it all for days.

Informative example

# application.yml
spring:
  kafka:
    bootstrap-servers: kafka:9092
    consumer:
      group-id: orders-svc
      auto-offset-reset: earliest

@Service @RequiredArgsConstructor
public class OrderEvents {
  private final KafkaTemplate<String, OrderPlaced> kafka;
  public void publish(OrderPlaced e) {
    kafka.send("order.placed", String.valueOf(e.orderId()), e);
  }
}

@KafkaListener(topics = "order.placed", groupId = "billing-svc")
public void onOrderPlaced(OrderPlaced e) {
  billing.charge(e);
}

Best practices

Pick a stable partition key (userId / orderId) — ordering hangs on it.
Make consumers idempotent; at-least-once delivery means duplicates happen.
Schema with Avro/Protobuf in a registry — never JSON without schemas.

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