Kafka is a distributed publish-subscribe messaging system that is fast, scalable, and durable.
Kafka stores messages in the form of topics. Consumers read data from a topic. Producers write data to a topic. Kafka topics are partitioned and replicated across multiple nodes thereby allowing distributed processing.
Kafka consumers and producers do not exchange data directly between themselves. A Kafka broker works as an intermediary between consumers and producers to disseminate data. A Kafka cluster can consist of multiple brokers. Kafka uses ZooKeeper to manage the Kafka cluster.