How do you use Spring Retry with Spring Kafka consumers?

Spring Kafka provides its own retry and error-handling abstractions, but Spring Retry integrates naturally through the SeekToCurrentErrorHandler (or DefaultErrorHandler in newer versions) combined with FixedBackOff or ExponentialBackOff.

Configuring retry in a Kafka listener container:

@Bean
public DefaultErrorHandler kafkaErrorHandler() {
    ExponentialBackOff backOff = new ExponentialBackOff(500L, 2.0);
    backOff.setMaxAttempts(4);
    DefaultErrorHandler handler = new DefaultErrorHandler(backOff);
    handler.addNotRetryableExceptions(SerializationException.class);
    return handler;
}

@Bean
public ConcurrentKafkaListenerContainerFactory<?, ?> kafkaListenerContainerFactory(
    ConsumerFactory<?, ?> cf, DefaultErrorHandler errorHandler) {
    var factory = new ConcurrentKafkaListenerContainerFactory<>();
    factory.setConsumerFactory(cf);
    factory.setCommonErrorHandler(errorHandler);
    return factory;
}

Spring Kafka's ExponentialBackOff is from the core Spring Framework utilities, not Spring Retry, but the retry behavior is conceptually the same. For more complex scenarios, you can publish failed messages to a dead-letter topic (DLT) using DeadLetterPublishingRecoverer as the recovery action after all retries are exhausted.

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