Apache Kafka is an open-source stream-processing software platform that allows companies to build sophisticated data pipelines by providing a unified, high-throughput, low-latency platform for handling real-time data feeds. It offers several key benefits, including horizontal scalability, fault-tolerance, and speed. Kafka's architecture enables the decoupling of publishing and consuming messages, allowing it to store in-flight messages, making it a more scalable alternative to traditional publish-subscribe models. The platform also guarantees ordering and parallelism, making it suitable for real-time processing of data streams. Companies such as Hulu and Wayfair have successfully integrated Kafka with InfluxDB to create robust real-time data pipeline solutions that can scale to meet high-throughput metric ingestion requirements.