Serdes & Data Serialization in Kafka Streams
Learn how Kafka Streams uses Serdes to serialize and deserialize keys and values, and how to configure default and per-operation Serdes.
What Is a Serde?
A Serde is a combined Serializer and Deserializer. Kafka Streams uses it to convert between your Java objects and the bytes stored in Kafka.
Every key and value flowing through a topology needs a Serde.
Why Streams Needs Serdes Everywhere
Unlike a plain consumer, Kafka Streams writes intermediate results back to Kafka (for repartitioning and state).
So it must know how to serialize data not just on input/output, but at every shuffle and store — hence Serdes appear throughout the API.
All lessons in this course
- Building a Simple Kafka Streams App
- KStream & KTable Concepts
- Stateless vs. Stateful Operations
- Serdes & Data Serialization in Kafka Streams