What is Apache Kafka?

Apache Kafka is an open-source distributed event streaming platform that enables the capturing, storage, and processing of data in real-time. It facilitates event-driven architectures by collecting, storing, and making events available for client applications to stream data in real-time. The platform works as a cluster of servers that work together using replication to improve performance and protect against data loss. Topics in Kafka are a series of events stored in a log that belong to a similar category. The Kafka Streams API allows the transforming of data with low latency, retrieving data from the streams can be stateless, stateful, or with a specified time range. RapidAPI is an API platform that allows discovery of Kafka clusters and topics, viewing of schemas, testing/consuming of records from a browser, and sending and receiving events as part of the event processing stream.