Is Kafka like an asynchronous queue which gives fast and fault tolerant performance with huge data?

[Monica Shiralkar]

Kafka is used for streaming use cases. E.g Data coming from devices to be processed by Spark/Flink/Strom. To understand why we use Kafka, can one think of it like a Queue which enables asynchronous communication, is fault tolerant and gives good performance for huge data.
Thanks.