Community | Data processing with Kafka Streams - An overview of stateless operations

Apache Kafka serves as a key component in data architectures. It has a rich ecosystem for building scalable data-intensive services including data pipelines, etc.

Kafka (Producer and Consumer) client APIs allow you to choose from a variety of programming languages to produce and consume data from Kafka topics.
You can integrate heterogeneous data systems using Kafka Connect which has an extensive suite of pre-built connectors and a framework that allows you to build custom integrations.
You can use Kafka Streams (Java library) to develop streaming applications to process data flowing through Kafka topics.

Common requirements in data processing include filtering data, transforming it from one form to another, applying an action to each data record etc. These are often categorized as stateless operations. Kafka Streams is an ideal candidate if you want to apply stateless transformations on streaming data in Kafka. The KStream abstraction (part of Kafka Streams DSL API) offers functions such as filter, map, groupBy etc.

In this blog post, you will get an overview of these stateless operations along with practical examples and code snippets. I have grouped them into the following categories: map, filter, group, terminal along with some miscellaneous features.

First things first ...

To work with Kafka Streams, you need to start by creating an instance of KafkaStreams that serves as the entry point of your stream processing application. It needs a Topology along with a java.util.Properties object for additional configuration.

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Properties config = new Properties();

config.setProperty(StreamsConfig.APPLICATION_ID_CONFIG, App.APP_ID);
config.setProperty(StreamsConfig.BOOTSTRAP_SERVERS_CONFIG, "localhost:9092");
config.setProperty(StreamsConfig.DEFAULT_KEY_SERDE_CLASS_CONFIG, Serdes.String().getClass().getName());
config.setProperty(StreamsConfig.DEFAULT_VALUE_SERDE_CLASS_CONFIG, Serdes.String().getClass().getName());

A Topology is what defines your stream processing application - it's an acyclic graph of sources, processors, and sinks. Once you have defined the Topology, create the KafkaStreams instance and start processing.

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//details omitted
Topology topology = ....;

KafkaStreams app = new KafkaStreams(topology, config);
app.start();

//block
new CountdownLatch(1).await(); 

Let's dive into the specifics of the Kafka Streams APIs which implement these stateless operations.

Transform data with `map` operations

map is a commonly used stateless operation which can be used to transform each record in the input KStream by applying a mapper function.

It is available in multiple flavors - map, mapValues, flatMap, flatMapValues

For example, to convert key and value to uppercase, use the map method:

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stream.map(new KeyValueMapper<String, String, KeyValue<String, String>>() {
    @Override
    public KeyValue<String, String> apply(String k, String v) {
            return new KeyValue&lt;&gt;(k.toUpperCase(), v.toUpperCase());
        }
    });

If you only need to alter the value, use mapValues :

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stream.mapValues(value -> value.toUpperCase());

flatMap is similar to map, but it allows you to return multiple records (KeyValues).

Say you have a stream of records (foo <-> a,b,c), (bar <-> d,e) etc., where foo and bar are keys and "a,b,c", "d,e" are CSV string values. You want the resulting stream to be as follows: (foo,a), (foo,b), (foo,c), (bar,d), (bar,e). Here is an example of how this can be achieved:

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stream.flatMap(new KeyValueMapper<String, String, Iterable<? extends KeyValue<? extends String, ? extends String>>>() {
    @Override
    public Iterable<? extends KeyValue<? extends String, ? extends String>> apply(String k, String csvRecord) {
        String[] values = csvRecord.split(",");
        return Arrays.asList(values)
                    .stream()
                    .map(value -> new KeyValue<>(k, value))
                    .collect(Collectors.toList());
            }
    })

Each record in the stream gets flatMapped such that each CSV (comma-separated) value is first split into its constituents, and a KeyValue pair is created for each part of the CSV string.

There is also flatMapValues in case you only want to accept a value from the stream and return a collection of values.

Include/Exclude data using `filter`

For example, if values in a topic are words and you want to include the ones which are greater than a specified length. You can use filter since it allows you include records based on a criteria which can be defined using a Predicate. The result is a new KStream instance with the filtered records:

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KStream<String, String> stream = builder.stream("words");
stream.filter(new Predicate<String, String>() {
    @Override
    public boolean test(String k, String v) {
            return v.length() > 5;
        }
    })

filterNot lets you exclude records based on a criteria. Here is an example (lambda style):

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KStream<String, String> stream = builder.stream("words");
stream.filterNot((key,value) -> value.startsWith("foo"));

Use `group`ing to prepare data for stateful operations

Grouping is often a prerequisite to stateful aggregations in Kafka Streams. To group records by their key, you can use groupByKey as such:

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StreamsBuilder builder = new StreamsBuilder();
KStream<String, String> stream = builder.stream(INPUT_TOPIC); 
       
KGroupedStream<String,String> kgs = stream.groupByKey();

groupByKey returns a KGroupedStream object

groupBy is a generic version of groupByKey which gives you the ability to group based on a different key using a KeyValueMapper:

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stream.groupBy(new KeyValueMapper<String, String, String>() {
    @Override
    public String apply(String k, String v) {
        return k.toUpperCase();
    }
});

groupByKey and groupBy allow you to specify a different Serde (Serializer and Deserializer) instead of the default ones. Just use the overloaded version which accepts a Grouped object:

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stream.groupByKey(Grouped.with(Serdes.Bytes(), Serdes.Long()));

Terminal operations

Not all stateless computations return intermediate results such as a KStream, KTable etc. They are often called terminal operations whose methods return void. Let's look at a few examples.

Save record to a topic

You may want to write the results of a stateless operation back to Kafka - most likely, in a different topic. You can use the to method to store the records of a KStream to a topic in Kafka.

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KStream<String, String> stream = builder.stream("words");

stream.mapValues(value -> value.toUpperCase())
      .to("uppercase-words");

An overloaded version of to allows you to specify a Produced object to customize the Serdes and partitioner:

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stream.mapValues(value -> value.toUpperCase())
      .to("output-topic",Produced.with(Serdes.Bytes(), Serdes.Long()));

You are not limited to a fixed/static topic name. TopicNameExtractor allows you to include custom logic to choose a specific topic in a dynamic manner. Here is a simplified example - say you are using a map operation to convert each record to its upper case, and need to store it in a topic that has the original name with _uppercase appended to it:

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stream.mapValues(value -> value.toUpperCase())
    .to(new TopicNameExtractor<String, String>() {
        @Override
        public String extract(String k, String v, RecordContext rc) {
            return rc.topic()+"_uppercase";
        }
    });

In this example, we make use of RecordContext (contains record metadata) to get the name of the source topic.

In all the above cases, the sink/target topic should pre-exist in Kafka

Debugging records

print is useful for debugging purposes - you can log each record in the KStream. It also accepts an instance of Printed to configure the behavior.

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StreamsBuilder builder = new StreamsBuilder();
KStream<String, String> stream = builder.stream(INPUT_TOPIC);
stream.mapValues(v -> v.toUpperCase()).print(Printed.toSysOut());

This will print out the records e.g. if you pass in (foo, bar) and (john, doe) to the input topic, they will get converted to uppercase and logged as such:

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[KSTREAM-MAPVALUES-0000000001]: foo, BAR
[KSTREAM-MAPVALUES-0000000001]: john, DOE

You can also use Printed.toFile (instead of toSysOut) to target a specific file

Do something for every record

foreach is yet another terminal operation, but accepts a ForeachAction so you can specify what you want to do with each record in the KStream.

Miscellaneous features

Here are some other useful operations offered by the Kafka Streams API:

peek

Since print is a terminal operation, you no longer have access to the original KStream. This where peek comes in handy because it returns the same KStream instance. Just like foreach, it accepts a ForeachAction which can use to specify what you want to do for each record.

The flexibility that peek means that not only can you log each key-value pair, but you can also materialize them to an output topic (unlike the print operation) using the same chain of method calls:

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StreamsBuilder builder = new StreamsBuilder();
KStream<String, String> stream = builder.stream(INPUT_TOPIC);

stream.mapValues(v -> v.toUpperCase())
      .peek((k,v) -> System.out.println("key="+k+", value="+v))
      .to(OUTPUT_TOPIC);

through

While developing your processing pipelines with Kafka Streams DSL, you will find yourself pushing resulting stream records to an output topic using to and then creating a new stream from that (output) topic.

Say you want to transform records, store the result in a topic and then continue to process the new (transformed) records, here is how you get this done:

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StreamsBuilder builder = new StreamsBuilder();
KStream<String, String> stream1 = builder.stream(INPUT_TOPIC);

stream1.mapValues(v -> v.toUpperCase()).to(OUTPUT_TOPIC);

//output topic now becomes the input source
KStream<String, String> stream2 = builder.stream(OUTPUT_TOPIC);

//continue processing with stream2
stream2.filter((k,v) -> v.length > 5).to(LENGTHY_WORDS_TOPIC);

Since to is terminal operation, a new KStream (stream2) had to be created. The through method can help simplify this. You can rewrite the above using a single chain of calls:

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StreamsBuilder builder = new StreamsBuilder();
KStream<String, String> stream = builder.stream(INPUT_TOPIC);

stream.mapValues(v -> v.toUpperCase())
      .through(OUTPUT_TOPIC)
      .filter((k,v) -> v.length > 5)
      .to(LENGTHY_WORDS_TOPIC);

merge

Say you have streaming data coming into two different Kafka topics, each of which is represented by a KStream. You can merge the contents of these KStreams into a single stream.

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StreamsBuilder builder = new StreamsBuilder(); 

KStream<String, String> stream1 = builder.stream("topic1");
KStream<String, String> stream2 = builder.stream("topic2");

stream1.merge(stream2).to("output-topic");

Caveat: The resulting stream may not have all the records in order

`selectKey`

With the help of a KeyValueMapper, selectKey allows you to derive a new key with a different data type.

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StreamsBuilder builder = new StreamsBuilder();
KStream<Integer, String> stream = builder.stream(INPUT_TOPIC);

stream.selectKey(new KeyValueMapper<Integer, String, String>() {
            @Override
            public String apply(Integer k, String v) {
                return Integer.toString(k);
            }
        })

branch

branch seems quite interesting, but something I have not used a lot (to be honest!). You can use it to evaluate every record in a KStream against multiple criteria (represented by a Predicate) and produce multiple KStreams (an array) as output. The key differentiator is that you can use multiple Predicates instead of a single one as is the case with filter and filterNot.

Wrap up

This blog post summarized most of the key stateless operations available in Kafka Streams along with code examples. You can combine them to build powerful streaming applications with the flexibility to adopt a functional programming style (using Java Lambda Expressions) or a more traditional, explicit way of defining your data processing logic.

Happy Building!

Any opinions in this post are those of the individual author and may not reflect the opinions of AWS.

Site Terms, Privacy, and more.

Data processing with Kafka Streams - An overview of stateless operations

Learn stateless operations in Kafka Streams with practical examples.

First things first ...

Transform data with `map` operations

Include/Exclude data using `filter`

Use `group`ing to prepare data for stateful operations

Terminal operations

Save record to a topic

Debugging records

Do something for every record

Miscellaneous features

peek

through

merge

`selectKey`

branch

Wrap up

Comments

Site Terms, Privacy, and more.

Site Terms, Privacy, and more.

Data processing with Kafka Streams - An overview of stateless operations

Learn stateless operations in Kafka Streams with practical examples.

First things first ...

Transform data with map operations

Include/Exclude data using filter

Use grouping to prepare data for stateful operations

Terminal operations

Save record to a topic

Debugging records

Do something for every record

Miscellaneous features

peek

through

merge

selectKey

branch

Wrap up

Comments

Transform data with `map` operations

Include/Exclude data using `filter`

Use `group`ing to prepare data for stateful operations

`selectKey`