What are the main distinguishing features of Apache Kafka as a messaging system?

Main features of Apache Kafka:

• High performance and scalability — Kafka can process millions of messages per second.
• Publish-subscribe with message retention — messages are stored in topics on disk, allowing consumers to read them at any time.
• Distributed architecture — Kafka operates as a cluster of brokers, providing fault tolerance and load balancing.
• Delivery guarantees — supports different levels of message delivery guarantees: "at most once", "at least once", "exactly once".
• Stream processing support — integration with Kafka Streams for real-time data processing.

These features make Kafka popular for building messaging systems and processing large data streams.