Deep Dive into Real-Time Notifications in Spring Boot with Kafka

Real-time notifications have become indispensable in modern applications. They keep users informed and engaged with timely updates. Adding Kafka, a distributed streaming platform, can enhance the scalability and fault tolerance of your real-time notification system. This blog explores how to implement real-time notifications in Spring Boot with WebSocket, STOMP, and Kafka.

Why Use Kafka in Real-Time Notifications?

Apache Kafka acts as a message broker, decoupling producers (components generating notifications) and consumers (WebSocket handlers or other systems delivering notifications).

Benefits of Kafka:

1. Scalability: Kafka handles a high volume of messages and scales horizontally.
2. Decoupled Architecture: Producers and consumers operate independently.
3. Fault Tolerance: Kafka’s distributed nature ensures data durability.
4. Replayability: Kafka stores messages for a defined retention period, allowing for replay in case of failures.

Architecture Overview

Components:

1. Producers: Publish notification messages to Kafka topics.