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Apache Kafka is a high-throughput, fault-tolerant stream platform used by over 80% of Fortune 100 firms. Producers publish to topics (partitioned for parallelism); consumers read via consumer groups; brokers store data. Key real-time use cases: centralized log aggregation, event sourcing with durable, replayable events, real-time analytics (integrate with Spark/Flink), data integration pipelines, and IoT sensor processing for monitoring and predictive maintenance. Best practices: design topics/partitions for consumption patterns; group consumers for scale and resilience; set retention per use case to control cost/compliance; monitor latency, throughput and consumer lag (Kafka Manager/Confluent Control Center); perform regular maintenance and secure clusters with encryption, auth/authz (Apache Ranger/Confluent).