Apache Kafka is an open-source platform designed for handling real-time data feeds. It allows users to publish, subscribe to, store, and process streams of records in a fault-tolerant manner. Kafka is widely used for building data pipelines and streaming applications, making it easier to manage large volumes of data across different systems. At its core, Kafka operates as a distributed messaging system, where data is organized into topics. Producers send messages to these topics, while consumers read from them. This architecture enables high throughput and scalability, making Kafka suitable for various applications, including log aggregation, event sourcing, and real-time analytics.