This product has charges associated with it for the build, maintenance, and support of the Amazon Machine Image (AMI). Kafka is primarily used to build real-time streaming data pipelines. It is an open-source system developed by the Apache Software Foundation and written in Java and Scala. Kafka runs on a cluster of one or more servers (called brokers), and the partitions of all topics are distributed across the cluster nodes. Additionally, partitions are replicated to multiple brokers. A Kafka cluster is not only highly scalable and fault-tolerant, but it also has a much higher throughput compared to other message brokers such as ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ. We have packaged and hardened the Kafka service offering so our customers can seamlessly subscribe to this offering with no setup work from their end.