As I noted in my May 14, 2016 blog post,
Spark Structured Streaming, which brings the ability to stream a data source into a DataFrame and query it with SQL in real-time, was announced with much fanfare (along with Spark 2.0) at Spark Summit 2016, but notably absent at the time was its support for Kafka.
Yes, Spark 2.1, released last week, now supports Kafka in Spark Structured Streaming. But so does Spark 2.0.2, quietly released on November 14, 2016.
So we no longer "have to wait for it" as I blogged last May.