Spring Into Confluent Cloud With Kotlin—Part 1: Producers and Consumers

The Spring Framework and Apache Kafka have been integrated for years, allowing organizations to transition from traditional microservices to event-driven architectures with minimal disruption. A new guide is available on how to build GenAI apps faster using Spring Boot, Apache Kafka, Confluent Cloud, and Kotlin, leveraging the expressive nature of the Kotlin language and coroutines to simplify development. The guide covers producing events to Apache Kafka topics through Confluent Cloud, registering schemas with Schema Registry, and consuming events using the `@KafkaListener` annotation. It also discusses how to configure Spring Boot applications for Avro-serialized events, including generating Java classes from Avro schema documents and configuring producer and consumer settings. The guide provides a simple example of sending events to Kafka topics from a Spring application and demonstrates how to use Spring Cloud Config to import external configuration as environment variables.