Spring Cloud Stream provides a streaming abstraction over messaging, based on the publish and subscribe integration pattern. Spring Cloud Stream currently comes with built-in support for Apache Kafka and RabbitMQ. A number of separate projects exist that provide integration with other popular messaging systems. See https://github.com/spring-cloud?q=binder for more details.

The core concepts in Spring Cloud Stream are as follows:

Message: A data structure that's used to describe data sent to and received from a messaging system.

Publisher: Sends messages to the messaging system, also known as a Supplier.

Subscriber: Receives messages from the messaging system, also known as a Consumer.

Destination: Used to communicate with the messaging system. Publishers use output destinations and subscribers use input destinations. Destinations are mapped by the specific binders to queues and topics in the underlying messaging system.

Binder: A binder provides the actual integration with a specific messaging system, similar to what a JDBC driver does for a specific type of database. 

Spring Cloud Stream. Spring Cloud Stream provides a streaming abstraction over messaging, based on the publish and subscribe integration pattern. Spring Cloud Stream currently comes with built-in support for Apache Kafka and RabbitMQ. A number of separate projects exist that provide integration with other popular messaging systems.

Message: A data structure that's used to describe data sent to and received from a messaging system.

Publisher: Sends messages to the messaging system, also known as a Supplier.

Subscriber: Receives messages from the messaging system, also known as a Consumer.

Destination: Used to communicate with the messaging system. Publishers use output destinations and subscribers use input destinations. Destinations are mapped by the specific binders to queues and topics in the underlying messaging system.

Binder: A binder provides the actual integration with a specific messaging system, similar to what a JDBC driver does for a specific type of database.