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// overview/assembly-key-features.adoc

[id="key-features-kafka_{context}"]
= Kafka capabilities

The underlying data stream-processing capabilities and component architecture of Kafka can deliver:

* Microservices and other applications to share data with extremely high throughput and low latency
* Message ordering guarantees
* Message rewind/replay from data storage to reconstruct an application state
* Message compaction to remove old records when using a key-value log
* Horizontal scalability in a cluster configuration
* Replication of data to control fault tolerance
* Retention of high volumes of data for immediate access

= Kafka use cases

Kafka's capabilities make it suitable for:

* Event-driven architectures
* Event sourcing to capture changes to the state of an application as a log of events
* Message brokering
* Website activity tracking
* Operational monitoring through metrics
* Log collection and aggregation
* Commit logs for distributed systems
* Stream processing so that applications can respond to data in real time
