Apache Kafka is a distributed streaming platform designed for building real-time data pipelines and streaming applications. It operates as a publish-subscribe messaging system, allowing multiple producers to publish data (as "events" or "messages") to topics, and multiple consumers to subscribe to these topics to process the data. Kafka is known for its high throughput, fault tolerance, and scalability, making it suitable for handling large volumes of data with low latency. It persists data in a distributed, fault-tolerant manner across a cluster of servers called brokers, ensuring data durability and availability even in the face of server failures.