Kafka is a distributed publish-subscribe messaging system that provides high throughput and low latency for processing streaming data. It is used to handle large volumes of data in real-time by partitioning topics across multiple servers or brokers. Kafka maintains ordered and immutable logs of messages that can be consumed by subscribers. It provides features like replication, fault tolerance and scalability. Some key Kafka concepts include producers that publish messages, consumers that subscribe to topics, brokers that handle data streams, topics to categorize related messages, and partitions to distribute data loads across clusters.