| Apache Kafka is a distributed, fault-tolerant, high-throughput streaming platform designed for building real-time data pipelines and streaming applications. Essentially, it acts as a central nervous system for an organization's data, enabling different applications and systems to reliably exchange information in a scalable and resilient manner, facilitating use cases like event logging, metrics aggregation, stream processing, and commit log replication. 
From the above architecture, an external application triggers a Lambda function via API Gateway. The Lambda function then sends a message to a Kafka topic. A consumer on a bastion host verifies the message by reading it from the topic.
A bastion host for observing the produced messages on the cluster.
An Amazon MSK (Managed Streaming for Kafka) broker is the core component of a Kafka cluster, responsible for storing data as partitioned logs, handling read and write requests from producers and consumers, and replicating data for fault tolerance and high availability. It receives data streams from producers, organizes them into topics and partitions, and stores them durably on disk. Consumers then connect to the brokers to read data from specific topics and partitions, enabling real-time data processing and analysis. Essentially, the broker acts as the central hub for all Kafka operations, managing the flow of data and ensuring its reliability.
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