What is Apache Kafka?

Apache Kafka is an open-source, distributed event streaming platform originally developed at LinkedIn and donated to the Apache Software Foundation. It is designed for high-throughput, fault-tolerant, real-time data streaming and can handle millions of messages per second. Kafka acts as a distributed commit log — messages are written to disk and replicated, enabling durability and replay. It decouples data producers from consumers, enabling asynchronous, scalable architectures. Kafka is used for real-time analytics, event sourcing, log aggregation, stream processing, and as a backbone for microservice communication. It is one of the most widely deployed pieces of infrastructure in modern data-intensive systems.