Subscribing a rest api to kafka events

Question

I recently started working on Kafka for a project of mine.

I am trying to figure out how can I subscribe a rest API to a Kafka event rather than running a consumer which keeps on listening to the topic.

I came across Kafka connect, but not able to figure out exactly how to achieve the same.

Details: I am running a spring-boot project as a producer which uses KafkaTemplate provided by spring to publish the message. Also, the consumer is a Spring Boot project which exposes rest APIs.

Answer 1

There is no other way than to use the Kafka consumer library to have data come from Kafka. Kafka Connect would do the same.

A RESTful service is stateless. Having a consumer is more stateful (offset maintenance, for example).

If you want streaming events in general, maybe you could look into WebSockets or gRPC instead.