Apache Kafka is a distributed publish-subscribe messaging system that allows for high throughput, low latency data ingestion and distribution. It provides reliability through replication, scalability by partitioning topics across brokers, and durability by persisting messages to disk. Common uses of Kafka include metrics collection, log aggregation, and stream processing using frameworks like Spark Streaming. Kafka's architecture includes brokers that store topics which are partitions distributed across a cluster, with ZooKeeper for coordination. Producers write messages to topics and consumers read messages in a subscriber model.