Yes, Apache Kafka is considered to be a distributed streaming platform. A streaming platform can be called such if it has the following three capabilities:
* Be able to publish and subscribe to streams of data.
* Provide services similar to that of a message queue or scalable enterprise messaging system.
* Store streams of records in a durable and fault-tolerant manner.
Since Kafka meets all three of these requirements, it can be considered to be a streaming platform.
Furthermore, since a Kafka cluster consists of multiple servers that function as brokers, it is said to be distributed. Kafka topics are divided into multiple partitions to ensure load balancing. Brokers process these partitions parallelly and allow multiple producers and consumers to publish and retrieve messages in parallel.
Distributed streaming platforms handle large amounts of data in real-time by pushing them to multiple servers for real-time processing.
