Kafka's growth is exploding, with more than 1/3 of Fortune 500 companies using it. Kafka is a fast, scalable, durable messaging system that is often used for real-time streaming of big data, such as tracking service calls or IoT sensors. It can feed data to systems like Hadoop, Spark, Storm and Flink for real-time analytics and processing. Major companies like LinkedIn, Twitter, Square, Spotify and Netflix rely on Kafka to handle high volumes of data streams. The key reasons for Kafka's popularity are its great performance, which it achieves through techniques like zero-copy, batching, and sequential writes to disk.