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Introduction to Kafka with Spring Boot (Udemy.com)

Create robust Event Driven Microservices using Spring Boot and Apache Kafka

Created by: John Thompson

Last updated August 2026

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What you will learn

  • Learn what Kafka is and how it works
  • How to install and run Kafka locally
  • Create a Spring Boot application that integrates with Kafka
  • Unit testing and Integration testing for Kafka
  • Consuming and Producing messages with Spring Kafka
  • Learn how to retry failed Kafka messages
  • Spring Boot integration tests with the embedded Kafka broker
  • Serialization and the different formats, including Strings and JSON
  • Dead letter topics
  • Learn all the core Kafka messaging concepts including messages, topics, partitions and keys
  • Message ordering - ensuring your messages are consumed in the correct sequence
  • Cover the important Spring and Spring Kafka annotations
  • How to configure your Kafka Spring Beans
  • How to use Wiremock to trigger failure scenarios that we can test
  • Consumer groups, rebalancing, and consumer failover
  • Understand the role of consumer offsets

How it compares

Against the other 518 rated Udemy courses in Software Development on CourseDuck:

  • Rating4.4 out of 5higher than 28% of them
  • Reviews781#168 of 519 by number of reviews
  • Length5.7 hoursshorter than 56% of them
  • Last updatedAugust 2026more recently than 86% of them

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Course Description

This is the course for learning Kafka, Java, with Spring and Spring Boot!
Our hands-on course is designed to teach you the concepts of Apache Kafka and demonstrates the advantages to be gained by using Spring Boot and the Spring framework.
By the end of the course you will have learned and used the techniques required of a production quality system that uses Apache Kafka.

On your learning journey you will cover:

  • Kafka Fundamentals

  • Unit Tests and Integration Testing using Embedded brokers

  • Failure concepts and how to handle them - Retries, Poison Pills, and Dead Letter Topics

  • Coding your own event driven services that communicate using Kafka.

  • And much more!


This course will take you as a developer who knows just the basics on Spring Boot and Java to being able to develop a fully functional, fully tested, application that connects with the Kafka messaging broker in order to send and receive messages.

In fact with our comprehensive code walkthroughs that start from scratch in writing our Spring Boot application you will be able to put together the application with no previous Spring Boot experience!

This course has been developed by a team of highly experienced Java Software Engineers and Kafka consultants working closely with John Thompson, the Spring Framework Guru - we understand what a developer needs from such a course - we have designed and implemented many Kafka systems that are in production today.


Code Samples
All the code that we walk through is available in the included git repositories for you to use as a starting point for your work, or for you to fork and extend as you begin to explore Kafka further.  Along the way there are assignments enabling you to put in practice what you have been learning, to build out a fully rounded microservices architecture.  We have accompanying articles on many of the Kafka concepts covered in the course - these go into greater depth providing you the opportunity to continue your learning and gain an advanced understanding on these areas.

** What real Students are saying about this course **

5 STARS - Fantastic course by Lydtech. I have learned Kafka and Spring boot from beginner to details.

5 STARS - This is a great course. I like the challenging quizzes and assignments. It is very focus on the characteristics of topics. The instructors usually respond to questions very quickly.

5 STARS - Very good course. I liked the structure a lot and how the topics build up on each other.

5 STARS - This was a really nice course, with a perfect mix of theory, code-along sections and individual assignments. I really enjoyed it!

5 STARS - Great introduction to Kafka Messaging, gives a lot of valuable insights and practical examples.

5 STARS - The course introduction has been clear and focused. It has set a good foundation on what I can expect in the course.

5 STARS - Great course to get introduced to Kafka with Spring boot. Loved that it reiterates on the concepts taught in the videos with quiz & hands-on exercises. I am pretty sure I will be revisiting the course again and will learn something new out of it.

5 STARS - Presentation and content is superbly done.

Inside this course you will learn about:

Kafka Background and Concepts:

  • The Kafka messaging broker

  • Key Kafka concepts including messages, keys, topics, partitions and offsets

  • The need for asynchronous communication

  • Comparison with other popular messaging brokers

  • Zookeeper vs KRaft

  • Consumer groups and rebalancing

  • Message Keys and Message ordering

Installing and Running Kafka:

  • Installing and running the broker locally (Linux/Mac)

  • Installing and running the broker locally on Windows using WSL

  • Using the Kafka command line tools

  • Sending and receiving messages

Spring Boot Application Development with Spring Kafka:

  • Creating the Spring Boot application with Spring Initializr

  • Spring Kafka APIs

  • Consuming messages using the KafkaListener, KafkaListenerContainerFactory and ConsumerFactory

  • Producing messages using the KafkaTemplate and ProducerFactory

  • Utilising Spring Kafka annotations leaving Spring to do the heavy lifting

  • Unit testing the Kafka consumer and producer with JUnit and Mockito

  • Integration testing with Spring Boot Test, Spring Kafka Test, and the embedded Kafka broker

  • Serializing and deserializing String and JSON messages

  • Avoiding poison pills with the correct error handling

  • Configuring Kafka Spring Beans programmatically vs in the application properties

  • Manual and automatic topic creation

  • Consumer group membership with shared vs duplicated message consumption

  • Consumer failover with multiple Spring Boot instances

  • Sending and receiving message keys

  • Ensuring related messages are ordered

  • Consuming multiple event types from the same topic

  • Configuring trusted packages

  • Retrying failed messages

  • Routing messages to the dead letter topic

  • Using Wiremock to trigger error scenarios

Course Extra - IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate

Students enrolling in the course can receive a free 4 month trial license to IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate! Get hands on experience using the Java IDE preferred by Spring Framework professionals!

Course Extra - Access to a Private Slack Community

You’re not just enrolling in a course --> You are joining a community learning Spring.

With your enrolment to the course, you can access an exclusive Slack community. Get help from the instructor and other Spring Framework Gurus from around the world - in real time! This community is only available to students enrolled in this course.

This is a very active Slack community with over 18,700 Spring Framework Gurus!

This is the largest online community of people learning Spring in the world.

With your enrolment, you can join this community of awesome gurus!

Closed Captioning / Subtitles

Closed captioning in English is available for all course videos!

PDF Downloads

All keynote presentations are available for you to download as PDFs.

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Instructor Details

John Thompson

Hi. I'm John.

I've been in the IT industry for over 25 years. Today, I specialize mainly in Java, the most successful and widely known programming language in use today. I also specialize with the Spring Framework, which the most popular open source application framework for building enterprise class applications on the Java platform. Just some of the organizations I've worked with include Visa, Kohls, Federal Home Loan Bank, and Belk Department Stores.

Through the courses I'm providing, I hope to leverage my years of experience to accelerate your learning of the Spring Framework. I'm not going to lie to you. The Spring Framework is a big framework. The environment for enterprise Java is even bigger. If you're new to Java, you have a lot to learn. I hope through the content on this web site I can accelerate your education of the Java and Spring landscape.

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Reviews

4.4

781 ratings on Udemy

Select a bar to show only those reviews.Select the bar again to show every rating.

By Sascha Bang on 6/22/2026

It's really difficult to follow most of the times because the code changes in the videos are so quick and it's hard to concentrate on both the audio and what's happening on screen. I have to pause every two seconds if I want to code along with the course and understand what's being said at the same time. Then, when a chapter changes, the code base seems to be different. E.g. when starting chapter 11, the package "dev.lydtech.dispatch" only contained the folder "messages", and all other code was gone. Instead, the sub-package "tracking" was edited. I tried to replicate the code from git, adding it to my project, but then ran into numerous compile errors because of duplicate method names. I would have liked to have some sort of guideline what the starting situation for the code should have been, if one does not just checkout the code branches from git, but wants to build the project from the ground up by themselves. I spent hours of fixing problems to get back to the state where the course was. Frustrating.

By Julio Chacon on 11/28/2025

theory is good error handling section is practically dead, the code was already there. this course requires a lot of investigation to complete the exercises. and the assignments were so bad to continue with the course in a fluently way. I think the course is good as an introduction with kakfa. don't take it so seriously.

By Robert Roy on 9/9/2025

This is an excellent and thorough course on kafka with spring. The instructors presented it very well by speaking and communicating much better than other courses I've taken. I did have some problems with things that didn't work as presented, but I was using Java 21 and Spring Boot 3.5.5. I had to use wiremock-spring-boot and also had to specify the dead letter topic as order.created-dlt in the integration test.

By Hrudaya Sahoo on 4/5/2025

EDIT: This course is excellent... The instructors use very precise wordings and no doubt remains in the mind of the learner ... the slides are excellent and the extra resources at the end of the lecture are simply marvellous! Really thanks a lot! So far this course has proved to be a very good intro to Kafka with Springboot

By Manuel Garcia on 6/22/2024

I like it! This course has a pretty good explanation about using Spring Kafka. I have previously learned Kafka from Stephan Marek before taking this course, and it helped me a lot to understand quickly this course. Above all, this course teaches writing good tests! Something many programming courses do not bother, and many entry developers take longer under Scrum because of not being taught testing. It would be good in the future if this course teaches springwolf to document these AsyncAPIs. This is a good tool to save developers time writing documentation for stakeholders like QA among others. In addition, a brief explanation of writing tests using MockConsumerFactory y MockProducerFactory would be good!

By Dubuis Jonathan on 5/24/2024

This training is really interesting for Java developers. It presents all the necessary information and best practices for developing Kafka applications with Spring. Moreover, the development content is very important and useful. However, the instructions to run Zookeeper and Kafka in the WSL were insufficient. I had to search for additional resources to resolve my issues.

By Segoy Thiel on 2/1/2024

The Content taught is exceptional, Very concise Course on how to use Kafka with Spring Boot. I guess the only thing to improve upon are the live-coding videos. It is hard to impossible to follow along, which is in my experience what most people like to do, instead of stopping the video and copy the code. or just downloading the code before or after and watch the video. So what I really would like to see is longer breaks after Code is changed so you get a chance to compare and no jumping around so rapidly. The explainations are really good though. The Assignments are very instructional as well. Only thing I noticed here: the Course is fairly new and you already have to downgrade your Spring Boot version to 3.0.xx, to have the Integration Tests running properly. Overall I am very satisfied with the course

By Jakub Łada on 1/17/2024

Very good course, a lot of valuable knowledge and hands on exercises! It would be a good idea to rename the course to: "Kafka with Spring Boot: Beginner to Guru". It would look much better and would be much more coherent to have list of courses: - Spring Framework 5: Beginner to Guru - Kafka with Spring Boot: Beginner to Guru

By Dmitrii Goltsov on 12/22/2023

Good course. Short, but effective lessons. Lectures are delivered in native, understandable English. Explanations and definitions are simple and logic. I want to especially emphasize assignments in the course. They were very useful, moderately challenging and helped to understand some Kafka's moments better. Thank you for a great course!

By Varun Upadhyay on 9/24/2023

Great course to get introduced to Kafka with Spring boot. Loved that it reiterates on the concepts taught in the videos with quiz & hands-on exercises. I am pretty sure I will be revisiting the course again and will learn something new out of it. Just a nitpick & I know this is personal preference: Please use a dark theme on IntelliJ so that viewers like me who are viewing courses from a dark room don't have to squint their eyes :P

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Overall Score : 88 / 100