So, I hear you’re developing Spring applications and microservices. Along comes event streaming with Apache KafkaⓇ and you need to integrate. As fate would have it, Spring and Kafka are already pretty good friends. This means you can leverage your organization’s expertise in building, testing, deploying, and monitoring Spring applications, while also reaping the benefits of event-driven design.

But why bore ourselves with yet another Java microservice. Kotlin is a first class citizen of the Spring framework. It’s proven itself as a popular language with constructs to simplify JVM-based development. And not just for cross-platform development, but for server-side implementations with frameworks like Spring, Ktor, and Micronaut - just to name a few.

In this session, I’ll walk you through writing a solution in Kotlin for producing and consuming Kafka events using Spring Kafka. We’ll highlight the Spring configuration involved in binding our application to a Kafka cluster in Confluent Cloud. We’ll use structured data - serialized with Apache Avro® - whose schemas are managed and governed by a schema registry.

When we’re done, you’ll be ready to explore this Spring-Kafka-Kotlin friendship for yourself.