Kafka Streams is a client library for processing and analyzing data stored in Kafka and either write the resulting data back to Kafka or send the final output to an external system. It builds upon important stream processing concepts such as properly distinguishing between event time and processing time, windowing support, and simple yet efficient management of application state. Kafka Streams has a low barrier to entry: You can quickly write and run a small-scale proof-of-concept on a single machine; and you only need to run additional instances of your application on multiple machines to scale up to high-volume production workloads. Kafka Streams transparently handles the load balancing of multiple instances of the same application by leveraging Kafka's parallelism model.
Some highlights of Kafka Streams:
There is a quickstart example that provides how to run a stream processing program coded in the Kafka Streams library. This section focuses on how to write, configure, and execute a Kafka Streams application.
We first summarize the key concepts of Kafka Streams.
Kafka Streams offers two ways to define the stream processing topology: the Kafka Streams DSL provides
the most common data transformation operations such as map and filter; the lower-level Processor API allows
developers define and connect custom processors as well as to interact with state stores.
A critical aspect in stream processing is the notion of time, and how it is modeled and integrated. For example, some operations such as windowing are defined based on time boundaries.
Common notions of time in streams are:
Kafka Streams assigns a timestamp to every data record
via the TimestampExtractor interface.
Concrete implementations of this interface may retrieve or compute timestamps based on the actual contents of data records such as an embedded timestamp field
to provide event-time semantics, or use any other approach such as returning the current wall-clock time at the time of processing,
thereby yielding processing-time semantics to stream processing applications.
Developers can thus enforce different notions of time depending on their business needs. For example,
per-record timestamps describe the progress of a stream with regards to time (although records may be out-of-order within the stream) and
are leveraged by time-dependent operations such as joins.
Some stream processing applications don't require state, which means the processing of a message is independent from the processing of all other messages. However, being able to maintain state opens up many possibilities for sophisticated stream processing applications: you can join input streams, or group and aggregate data records. Many such stateful operators are provided by the Kafka Streams DSL.
Kafka Streams provides so-called state stores, which can be used by stream processing applications to store and query data. This is an important capability when implementing stateful operations. Every task in Kafka Streams embeds one or more state stores that can be accessed via APIs to store and query data required for processing. These state stores can either be a persistent key-value store, an in-memory hashmap, or another convenient data structure. Kafka Streams offers fault-tolerance and automatic recovery for local state stores.
As we have mentioned above, the computational logic of a Kafka Streams application is defined as a processor topology. Currently Kafka Streams provides two sets of APIs to define the processor topology, which will be described in the subsequent sections.
Developers can define their customized processing logic by implementing the Processor interface, which
provides process and punctuate methods. The process method is performed on each
of the received record; and the punctuate method is performed periodically based on elapsed time.
In addition, the processor can maintain the current ProcessorContext instance variable initialized in the
init method, and use the context to schedule the punctuation period (context().schedule), to
forward the modified / new key-value pair to downstream processors (context().forward), to commit the current
processing progress (context().commit), etc.
public class MyProcessor extends Processor {
private ProcessorContext context;
private KeyValueStore kvStore;
@Override
@SuppressWarnings("unchecked")
public void init(ProcessorContext context) {
this.context = context;
this.context.schedule(1000);
this.kvStore = (KeyValueStore) context.getStateStore("Counts");
}
@Override
public void process(String dummy, String line) {
String[] words = line.toLowerCase().split(" ");
for (String word : words) {
Integer oldValue = this.kvStore.get(word);
if (oldValue == null) {
this.kvStore.put(word, 1);
} else {
this.kvStore.put(word, oldValue + 1);
}
}
}
@Override
public void punctuate(long timestamp) {
KeyValueIterator iter = this.kvStore.all();
while (iter.hasNext()) {
KeyValue entry = iter.next();
context.forward(entry.key, entry.value.toString());
}
iter.close();
context.commit();
}
@Override
public void close() {
this.kvStore.close();
}
};
In the above implementation, the following actions are performed:
init method, schedule the punctuation every 1 second and retrieve the local state store by its name "Counts".process method, upon each received record, split the value string into words, and update their counts into the state store (we will talk about this feature later in the section).punctuate method, iterate the local state store and send the aggregated counts to the downstream processor, and commit the current stream state.
With the customized processors defined in the Processor API, developers can use the TopologyBuilder to build a processor topology
by connecting these processors together:
TopologyBuilder builder = new TopologyBuilder();
builder.addSource("SOURCE", "src-topic")
.addProcessor("PROCESS1", MyProcessor1::new /* the ProcessorSupplier that can generate MyProcessor1 */, "SOURCE")
.addProcessor("PROCESS2", MyProcessor2::new /* the ProcessorSupplier that can generate MyProcessor2 */, "PROCESS1")
.addProcessor("PROCESS3", MyProcessor3::new /* the ProcessorSupplier that can generate MyProcessor3 */, "PROCESS1")
.addSink("SINK1", "sink-topic1", "PROCESS1")
.addSink("SINK2", "sink-topic2", "PROCESS2")
.addSink("SINK3", "sink-topic3", "PROCESS3");
There are several steps in the above code to build the topology, and here is a quick walk through:
addSource method, with one Kafka topic "src-topic" fed to it.addProcessor method; here the first processor is a child of the "SOURCE" node, but is the parent of the other two processors.addSink method, each piping from a different parent processor node and writing to a separate topic.
Note that the Processor API is not limited to only accessing the current records as they arrive, but can also maintain local state stores
that keep recently arrived records to use in stateful processing operations such as aggregation or windowed joins.
To take advantage of this local states, developers can use the TopologyBuilder.addStateStore method when building the
processor topology to create the local state and associate it with the processor nodes that needs to access it; or they can connect a created
local state store with the existing processor nodes through TopologyBuilder.connectProcessorAndStateStores.
TopologyBuilder builder = new TopologyBuilder();
builder.addSource("SOURCE", "src-topic")
.addProcessor("PROCESS1", MyProcessor1::new, "SOURCE")
// create the in-memory state store "COUNTS" associated with processor "PROCESS1"
.addStateStore(Stores.create("COUNTS").withStringKeys().withStringValues().inMemory().build(), "PROCESS1")
.addProcessor("PROCESS2", MyProcessor3::new /* the ProcessorSupplier that can generate MyProcessor3 */, "PROCESS1")
.addProcessor("PROCESS3", MyProcessor3::new /* the ProcessorSupplier that can generate MyProcessor3 */, "PROCESS1")
// connect the state store "COUNTS" with processor "PROCESS2"
.connectProcessorAndStateStores("PROCESS2", "COUNTS");
.addSink("SINK1", "sink-topic1", "PROCESS1")
.addSink("SINK2", "sink-topic2", "PROCESS2")
.addSink("SINK3", "sink-topic3", "PROCESS3");
In the next section we present another way to build the processor topology: the Kafka Streams DSL.
KStreamBuilder class, which is extended from the TopologyBuilder.
A simple example is included with the source code for Kafka in the streams/examples package. The rest of this section will walk
through some code to demonstrate the key steps in creating a topology using the Streams DSL, but we recommend developers to read the full example source
codes for details.
Either a record stream (defined as KStream) or a changelog stream (defined as KTable)
can be created as a source stream from one or more Kafka topics (for KTable you can only create the source stream
from a single topic).
KStreamBuilder builder = new KStreamBuilder();
KStream source1 = builder.stream("topic1", "topic2");
KTable source2 = builder.table("topic3");
There is a list of transformation operations provided for KStream and KTable respectively.
Each of these operations may generate either one or more KStream and KTable objects and
can be translated into one or more connected processors into the underlying processor topology.
All these transformation methods can be chained together to compose a complex processor topology.
Since KStream and KTable are strongly typed, all these transformation operations are defined as
generics functions where users could specify the input and output data types.
Among these transformations, filter, map, mapValues, etc, are stateless
transformation operations and can be applied to both KStream and KTable,
where users can usually pass a customized function to these functions as a parameter, such as Predicate for filter,
KeyValueMapper for map, etc:
// written in Java 8+, using lambda expressions
KStream mapped = source1.mapValue(record -> record.get("category"));
Stateless transformations, by definition, do not depend on any state for processing, and hence implementation-wise
they do not require a state store associated with the stream processor; Stateful transformations, on the other hand,
require accessing an associated state for processing and producing outputs.
For example, in join and aggregate operations, a windowing state is usually used to store all the received records
within the defined window boundary so far. The operators can then access these accumulated records in the store and compute
based on them.
// written in Java 8+, using lambda expressions
KTable, Long> counts = source1.aggregateByKey(
() -> 0L, // initial value
(aggKey, value, aggregate) -> aggregate + 1L, // aggregating value
HoppingWindows.of("counts").with(5000L).every(1000L), // intervals in milliseconds
);
KStream joined = source1.leftJoin(source2,
(record1, record2) -> record1.get("user") + "-" + record2.get("region");
);
At the end of the processing, users can choose to (continuously) write the final resulted streams back to a Kafka topic through
KStream.to and KTable.to.
joined.to("topic4");
If your application needs to continue reading and processing the records after they have been materialized
to a topic via to above, one option is to construct a new stream that reads from the output topic;
Kafka Streams provides a convenience method called through:
// equivalent to
//
// joined.to("topic4");
// materialized = builder.stream("topic4");
KStream materialized = joined.through("topic4");
Besides defining the topology, developers will also need to configure their applications
in StreamsConfig before running it. A complete list of
Kafka Streams configs can be found here.