Persistent connection to Kafka through Spring Boot?

Please excuse the ambiguity as I'm trying to be as clear as possible with the little knowledge that I have.

We have a Kafka cluster and the idea is to have a Spring Boot application to serve as the bridge between the Producers, Consumers and Kafka.

I've worked with simple REST, CRUD applications, in which I basically interact with the server on a request basis.

Question:

How do I go about creating a persistent connection between Spring and Kafka to send and receive messages?

Does the protocol matter?