Scrapy is an open-source web crawling framework written in Python that provides fast, high-level web scraping and web crawling capabilities. The core components of Scrapy include the engine, scheduler, downloader, spider, and pipeline. The engine is responsible for controlling the data flow through the system, the scheduler receives requests from the engine and queues them, the downloader downloads web page content, the spider parses web pages and extracts data, and the pipeline processes the extracted data. Scrapy also supports middleware mechanisms that allow custom logic to be inserted during request and response processing. The advantages of Scrapy include its high performance, scalability, and rich features such as asynchronous request processing, data export, and automatic throttling.