Bill Bejeck and Guozhang Wang give us an idea of some Kafka Streams internals:
At a high level, when you use the Streams DSL, it auto-creates the processor nodes as well as state stores if needed, and connects them to construct the processor topology. To dig a little deeper, let’s take an example and focus on stateful operators in this section.
An important observation regarding the Streams DSL is that most stateful operations are keyed operations (e.g., joins are based on record keys, and aggregations are based on grouped-by keys), and the computation for each key is independent of all the other keys. These computational patterns fall under the term data parallelism in the distributed computing world. The straightforward way to execute data parallelism at scale is to just partition the incoming data streams by key, and work on each partition independently and in parallel. Kafka Streams leans heavily on this technique in order to achieve scalability in a distributed computing environment.
They then use that info to show you how you can make your Streams apps faster.