The principle of least privilege dictates that each user and application will have the minimal privileges required to do their job when applied to Apache Kafka and its Streams API, balancing developer velocity and security. Organizations need to configure proper privileges for their Kafka Streams applications using two simple patterns: one provides tighter security, while the other offers more agility and development velocity. By defining a prefix for internal topics used by an application, developers can grant the necessary read/write/create access to all topics with that prefix, simplifying access control and reducing errors. This approach applies to both Kafka Streams and KSQL applications, allowing organizations to configure privileges efficiently and securely.