Apache Kafka first showed up in 2011 at LinkedIn. Jay Kreps made the decision to name it Kafka after the author Franz Kafka, whose work he fancied. Another thing that factors into the etymology is that it is a system optimized for writing. Kafka, as we know it, is an open-source stream-processing software platform written in Scala and Java. The Apache Software Foundation maintains the development and focusses its design heavily on transaction logs.

The four major APIs of Kafka are the Producer API, the Consumer API, the Connector API, and the Streams API.