This document provides an introduction to Apache Kafka, an open-source distributed event streaming platform. It discusses Kafka's history as a project originally developed by LinkedIn, its use cases like messaging, activity tracking and stream processing. It describes key Kafka concepts like topics, partitions, offsets, replicas, brokers and producers/consumers. It also gives examples of how companies like Netflix, Uber and LinkedIn use Kafka in their applications and provides a comparison to Apache Spark.