(You deploy a Kafka Streams application with five application instances.

According to the official Apache Kafka Streams documentation, Kafka Streams relies on internal topics (such as changelog topics and repartition topics) to store state, task assignments, and application metadata. These topics are essential for fault tolerance, rebalancing, and state recovery.

When auto-topic creation is disabled, Kafka Streams cannot automatically create the required internal topics unless they already exist. In this situation, the Streams application will fail during startup with a fatal, non-retriable exception, indicating that the necessary internal topics could not be created.

Kafka Streams does not pause or wait for manual topic creation, nor does it operate without storing metadata. Instead, it explicitly requires these topics to exist or be creatable. While administrators can manually pre-create the required internal topics with the correct configuration, failure to do so causes the application to terminate.

Therefore, the correct and documented behavior is that the Kafka Streams application terminates with a non-retriable exception when auto-topic creation is disabled and required internal topics are missing.