Apache Kafka is a distributed event streaming platform capable of handling trillions of events a day. It is used for building real-time data pipelines and streaming applications. Kafka is horizontally scalable, fault-tolerant, and fast.

Kafka allows you to publish, subscribe to, store, and process streams of records in real-time. It is often used in scenarios where data needs to be processed or moved between systems efficiently, such as log aggregation, real-time analytics, or as a backbone for microservices.