Apache Kafka is a distributed messaging system that uses the publish-subscribe mechanism. It was developed to support continuous and resilient messaging with high throughput at LinkedIn. Kafka is a fast, scalable, durable, and fault-tolerant system. It maintains feeds of messages in categories called topics. These topics are used to store messages from the producers and deliver them to the consumers who have subscribed to that topic.

Kafka is a durable, high volume message broker that enables applications to process, persist and re-process streaming data. Kafka has a straightforward routing approach that uses a routing key to send messages to a topic. Kafka o ers much higher performance than message brokers like RabbitMQ. Its boosted performance makes it suitable to achieve high throughput (millions of messages per second) with limited resources.