Distributed streaming platform for building real-time data pipelines and streaming applications. Like a high-speed highway system for data that can handle millions of messages per second.
Financial trading platforms use Kafka to process millions of market data updates and trade orders in real-time.
Amazon MSK is a managed Apache Kafka service. Azure Event Hubs and OCI Streaming are Kafka-like streaming services (Azure also offers Kafka on HDInsight). GCP commonly uses Pub/Sub for similar pub/sub streaming; Kafka is also available via partners like Confluent Cloud.