For testing purposes I deleted the target topic and was expecting the application to timeout after some time. However after some research I understood that Kafka Streams retries a message by default until the target topic comes online again and the configurations under StreamsConfig (task.timeout.ms, request.timeout.ms and retries = 0) are set for the Kafka Producer.
Could anyone reassure me that this conclusion was true and if not could you advise on the configurations that I need in order to force Kafka Streams to stop retrying after some period of time.
For this particular problem, Kafka Streams will currently retry forever, because the received TimeoutException is a Retriable exception.
It's a known issue: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/KAFKA-16508