What is a Kafka partition?

Kafka is a distributed system, running in a cluster. Each of the nodes in a Kafka cluster are referred to as brokers. The topics are partitioned and replicated across the brokers throughout the entirety of the implementation. 

These partitions allow users to parallelize topics, meaning data for any topic can be divided over multiple brokers.

Since a topic can be split into partitions over multiple machines, multiple consumers can read a topic in parallel. This organization sets Kafka up for high message throughput.