Kafka is a distributed event streaming platform. It stores and transmits events.
Topics: Named streams of events. Like database tables for events.
Producers: Write events to topics.
Consumers: Read events from topics.
Brokers: Servers that store data and serve requests.
Kafka guarantees:
- Ordering within a partition
- Durability through replication
- High throughput (millions of events/second)
Think of Kafka as a distributed commit log. Events are appended, never modified. Consumers track their position (offset) independently.