Kafka is an open-source distributed streaming platform. It allows for the seamless handling of high-throughput, real-time data feeds. Producers can publish messages to topics, which are then stored in a distributed and fault-tolerant manner across multiple brokers. Consumers can subscribe to these topics to retrieve and process the messages. It is widely used for building real-time data pipelines and streaming applications, facilitating efficient data transfer, storage, and analysis in various distributed systems.