Kafka is a distributed publish-subscribe system that is well-suited for building real-time data pipelines and streaming applications. It addresses issues that arise from scaling these applications, such as decoupling data producers and consumers and supporting parallel data processing. Kafka uses topics to organize streams of records called messages, which are partitioned and can be replicated across multiple servers. Producers write data to topics and consumers read from topics in a pull-based fashion coordinated by Zookeeper.