1.8 Historical / trivia worth knowing

Created at LinkedIn; team led by Jay Kreps (who had previously built and open-sourced Voldemort, a distributed key-value store), with Neha Narkhede and later Jun Rao.
Open source on GitHub late 2010; Apache incubator July 2011; graduated October 2012.
Used at Netflix, Uber, and many others in the largest data pipelines in the world.
LinkedIn maintains Cruise Control, Kafka Monitor, Burrow.
Confluent (founded fall 2014 by Kreps, Narkhede, Rao) released ksqlDB, a schema registry, and a REST proxy under a community license — note: not strictly open source, as it includes use restrictions. Confluent also runs Kafka Summit (since 2016).
The name: Jay Kreps — "since Kafka was a system optimized for writing, using a writer's name would make sense. I had taken a lot of lit classes in college and liked Franz Kafka. Plus the name sounded cool for an open source project. So basically there is not much of a relationship."