This document discusses Apache Kafka and the Confluent Platform for building streaming applications. It describes how Kafka allows producers to publish data to topics and consumers to subscribe to topics. The Confluent Platform adds features like Kafka Connect for integrating external systems, Kafka Streams for stream processing, and Control Center for monitoring streaming applications. It also lists several use cases for Kafka and companies that use it, and describes how the Confluent Platform integrates with Syncsort DMX.