New to Kafka and using Spring Boot? This is the no-fluff quick start I wish I had when I started. We'll send and receive our first Kafka message in a single Spring Boot application in just a few minutes.

In this video, we cover why Kafka exists, how it compares to other message brokers, and what Spring for Apache Kafka does to simplify the developer experience. Then we build a complete Spring Boot project from scratch — creating a topic, producing messages with KafkaTemplate, consuming them with @KafkaListener, adding a Kafka UI via Docker Compose, and writing an integration test with Embedded Kafka.

- Understand Kafka's core concepts: topics, partitions, offsets, and consumer groups
- Set up a Spring Boot project with the Spring for Apache Kafka starter and Docker Compose
- Produce messages using KafkaTemplate and consume them with @KafkaListener
- Run a Kafka UI dashboard locally for inspecting topics and messages
- Write integration tests using Embedded Kafka — no external broker needed

0:00 - Intro & Why This Video
0:45 - The Problem with Synchronous HTTP Services
2:15 - What Is Event-Driven Architecture?
2:50 - What Is Apache Kafka?
3:25 - Kafka Core Vocabulary: Topics, Partitions, Offsets, Consumer Groups
4:30 - How Kafka Works in Motion
5:10 - Why Teams Choose Kafka
5:50 - Kafka vs RabbitMQ vs SQS
6:40 - When to Reach for Kafka
7:10 - What Spring for Apache Kafka Gives You
8:30 - Producing & Consuming with Spring Kafka
9:30 - Testing with Embedded Kafka
10:10 - Building the Project from start.spring.io
11:15 - Docker Compose Setup for Kafka
11:50 - Creating a Kafka Topic Bean
13:00 - Producing Messages with KafkaTemplate
13:50 - Consuming Messages with @KafkaListener
14:40 - Running the App & Seeing It Work
15:30 - Adding Kafka UI Dashboard
16:45 - Exploring the Kafka UI
17:30 - Writing Tests with Embedded Kafka
20:30 - Wrap Up & What's Next (Spring Modulith + Kafka)

🔗Resources & Links mentioned in this video:
GitHub Repository: https://github.com/danvega/spring-kafka-quick-start
Spring for Apache Kafka Reference Docs: https://docs.spring.io/spring-kafka/reference/
Spring Initializr: https://start.spring.io
Apache Kafka Official Site: https://kafka.apache.org/
Kafka UI (GitHub): https://github.com/provectus/kafka-ui

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Website: https://www.danvega.dev
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Dan Vega

A beginner-friendly introduction to Spring for Apache Kafka, covering core Kafka concepts (topics, partitions, offsets, consumer groups) and how Spring simplifies Kafka integration. Walks through building a minimal Spring Boot project from scratch using Spring Initializr, configuring Docker Compose to run a local Kafka broker, creating a topic programmatically, sending a message with KafkaTemplate, consuming it with @KafkaListener, and writing an integration test using the embedded Kafka broker. Also demonstrates adding a Kafka UI dashboard for local development visibility.

Spring Boot + Kafka in 10 Minutes (Your First Message)