Apache Kafka is a powerful, distributed platform for handling real-time data streams by acting as a distributed commit log. It is used for everything from data pipelines to streaming analytics and is built for high throughput and low latency.
Kafka was originally developed at LinkedIn and is today one of the Apache Software Foundation's most widely used projects.
Apache Kafka works by writing events to partitioned logs called topics, where producers and consumers can interact without dictating each other's flow. This provides durability and enables exactly-once delivery semantics, meaning messages are neither lost nor duplicated. The partitioning model also allows Kafka to scale horizontally as demand grows.
Built in Java and Scala, Kafka can be used via official client libraries in multiple languages and has a large ecosystem of tools, interfaces and connectors - both official and community-driven.
Thanks to its reliability, performance and flexibility, Kafka is used by many Fortune 100 companies across industries like finance, telecom, logistics and manufacturing. With features such as Connect, Streams and tiered storage, Kafka continues to be a leading platform for modern, data-intensive applications.






