Spring Cloud Stream is a framework for building microservices that connect and integrate using streams of events. It supports Kafka, RabbitMQ, and other middleware. Kafka Streams is a client library for building stateful stream processing applications against Apache Kafka clusters. With Spring Cloud Stream, developers can write Kafka Streams applications using Java functions and have their code deployed and managed. This allows building stream processing logic directly against Kafka topics in a reactive, event-driven style.