Are Kafka stream/redis stream good for reactive architecture? I am asking this mainly because both redis and kafka seem to be blocking threads when consuming the messages.
Are there any reasons behind this? I was hoping that I could read messages with some callback - so execute when the message was delivered like pub/sub in a reactive manner. Not by blocking thread.
Kafka client is relatively low level, what is "good" as in: it provides you with much flexibility when (and in which thread) you'd do the record processing. In the end, to receive a record, someone needs to block (as actual reading is sending fetch requests over and over). Whether the thread being blocked is a "main-business" thread or some side-i/o dedicated one will depend on developer's choice.
You might take a look at higher-level offerings such as Spring-Kafka or Kafka Stream API / Kafka Connect frameworks that provide "fatter" inversion-of-control containers, effectively answering the above concern.