Apache Kafka is an open-source distributed event streaming platform used for building real-time data pipelines and streaming applications. It is horizontally scalable, fault-tolerant, and handles data streams in a distributed manner.
Imagine you have a huge message board where every new post (or message) gets instantly sent to everyone who cares about it. Apache Kafka is like a super-fast, organized version of this message board that can handle tons of posts per second and make sure all the right people get all the right messages quickly and reliably.
Apache Kafka is preferred for its high-throughput and low-latency capabilities, making it ideal for real-time data processing. It supports data replication and is fault-tolerant, ensuring data durability and reliability across distributed systems. Unlike traditional message brokers, Kafka's distributed nature allows it to handle more data and scale effectively as you add more servers to the cluster.