What is Kafka?

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

Kafka is often used for microservices integration, log collection, monitoring, and event-driven systems. The main components of Kafka are producers (message senders), brokers (servers that store and forward messages), and consumers (message recipients). Messages are organized into topics, which are divided into partitions for scalability and parallel processing.