Kafka Connect is designed to make it easier to build large-scale, real-time data pipelines by standardizing how you move data into and out of Kafka. It uses connectors to read from or write to external systems, manage data flow, and scale the system without writing new code. Kafka Connect manages common problems in connecting with other systems, such as scalability, fault tolerance, configuration, and management. The JDBC connector allows importing data from any relational database with a JDBC driver into Kafka, while the HDFS connector exports data from Kafka topics to HDFS files in various formats and integrates with Hive for immediate querying with HiveQL. Kafka Connect can perform database change capture, schema migration, and custom partitioning, making it easier to build scalable ETL pipelines.