Apache Kafka is a highly scalable, open-source distributed data store designed to handle real-time streaming data, offering capabilities such as data ingestion, processing, and storage in a fault-tolerant manner. It allows application services to publish and subscribe to data feeds, stores data in sequence, and efficiently processes data streams, making it an integral part of event-driven architectures used by large companies like Netflix. Kafka's architecture includes producers, brokers, and consumers, with data organized into topics and partitions for fault tolerance and scalability. It operates on a pull model, contrasting with systems like RabbitMQ that use a push model, which allows Kafka to cater to high-throughput applications. Developed initially at LinkedIn, Kafka was named after the writer Franz Kafka to reflect its optimization for writing, and it is widely used for building sophisticated event-streaming pipelines, often in conjunction with databases like CockroachDB.