What do you know about Kafka?

Apache Kafka is a distributed data streaming platform used for building real-time event processing systems. It allows publishing, storing, and processing streams of records (messages) with high throughput and low latency.

Key features of Kafka:

• Topics and partitions: data is organized into topics, which are divided into partitions for scalability.
• Producers and consumers: applications can act as message producers and consumers.
• Storage: Kafka stores data on disk with the ability to re-read, which distinguishes it from traditional queue systems.
• Delivery guarantees: supports different levels of message delivery guarantees (at least once, at most once, exactly once).

Example use case: a logging system where multiple services publish events to Kafka, and analytical services consume this data for processing and monitoring.