Kafka is a service bus: To connect heterogeneous applications, we need to implement a message publication mechanism to send and receive messages among them. A message router is known as message broker. Kafka is a message broker, a solution to deal with routing messages among clients in a quick way.
Kafka architecture has two directives: The first is to not block the producers (in order to deal with the back pressure). The second is to isolate producers and consumers. The producers should not know who their consumers are, hence Kafka follows the dumb broker and smart clients model.
Kafka is a real-time messaging system: Moreover, Kafka is a software solution with a publish-subscribe model: open source, distributed, partitioned, replicated, and commit-log-based.