Commonly known simply as Kafka, Apache Kafka is an open-source event streaming platform maintained by the Apache Software Foundation. Initially conceived at LinkedIn, Apache Kafka was collaboratively created by Jay Kreps, Neha Narkhede, and Jun Rao and subsequently released as an open-source project in 2011.
Today, Kafka is one of the most popular event streaming platforms designed to handle real-time data feeds. It is widely used to build scalable, fault-tolerant, and high-performance streaming data pipelines.