1) Apache Kafka is a distributed event streaming platform that is highly scalable, durable, fault-tolerant and provides publish-subscribe capabilities.
2) When deploying Kafka, it is important to consider data durability and tune configuration parameters like acks and min.insync.replicas to achieve the appropriate tradeoff between durability, availability and latency.
3) Many common issues can arise from not properly handling errors, exceptions and failures throughout the Kafka ecosystem. Proper monitoring, configuration, and exception handling is required.