Kafka takes message streams (from producer applications), reliably stores them on a cluster (via broker) and allows these streams to be received by applications (consumers) that process the messages.
Since it was donated to the Apache Foundation by LinkedIn in 2011, Kafka has garnered a lot of interest and is widely used by technology leaders such as Netflix, Twitter, Spotify and Uber. Under the Apache Foundation, Kafka has grown from an open, strong and vibrant community with many contributions to its development, offering compatibility with a wide range of complementary technologies.