Apache Kafka is a distributed streaming platform that allows building event-driven architectures. It provides high throughput and low latency for processing streaming data. Key features include event logging, publish-subscribe messaging, and stream processing capabilities. Some advantages are eventual consistency, scalability, fault tolerance and being more agile to maintain compared to traditional databases. It requires Zookeeper and the Java client API has undergone changes. Performance can be very high, with examples of LinkedIn processing 1.1 trillion messages per day and 2 million writes per second on modest hardware.