---
title: "Apache Kafka — Definition & Engineering Context"
description: "Apache Kafka is a distributed event store and stream-processing platform designed to handle high-throughput, real-time data feeds and event messaging streams with high fault tolerance."
canonical: https://erpstack.io/glossary/kafka
markdown_url: https://erpstack.io/glossary/kafka.md
publisher: ERPStack
---

# Apache Kafka

> **Definition:** Apache Kafka is a distributed event store and stream-processing platform designed to handle high-throughput, real-time data feeds and event messaging streams with high fault tolerance.

## In depth

Kafka acts as a highly flexible message broker. It ingests millions of events per second from sources like IoT devices, web clicks, or transaction ledgers, caching them across server clusters for background systems to process in order.

## How ERPStack applies this

We integrate Apache Kafka streams for clients processing millions of daily records, such as global supply chains or real-time IoT networks, preventing database lockups.

## Related reading

- [Event-Driven Architecture](https://erpstack.io/glossary/event-driven)
- [ClickHouse Database](https://erpstack.io/glossary/clickhouse)