Apache Kafka is a distributed event streaming platform designed to handle high-throughput, real-time data feeds. It allows for the seamless publication, storage, and processing of event streams across distributed systems, making it ideal for building data pipelines and real-time analytics applications. Kafka is highly scalable, fault-tolerant, and supports multiple producers and consumers, enabling the transfer of data between systems with low latency. It is widely used in use cases like log aggregation, stream processing, and building event-driven architectures.