Apache Kafka is a distributed streaming platform that enables building cloud-independent infrastructure for machine learning applications, allowing users to process data in real-time and deploy analytic models without writing complex source code. The platform provides various components such as Kafka Streams, KSQL, and Confluent Cloud, which enable users to build scalable, reliable, and fault-tolerant machine learning architectures. AutoML tools can also be integrated with Kafka for automated model building and deployment. Tech giants like Uber, Netflix, and PayPal use Apache Kafka as a central component in their machine learning infrastructure, taking advantage of its flexibility and scalability. The platform's ability to re-process data from its distributed commit log makes it an ideal match for machine learning architectures, allowing users to build integration pipelines for model training, deployment, and monitoring within Kafka applications.