Is Zookeeper a must for Kafka?

Question

In Kafka, I would like to use only a single broker, single topic and a single partition having one producer and multiple consumers (each consumer getting its own copy of dat

Answer 1

Important update - August 2019:

ZooKeeper dependency will be removed from Apache Kafka. See the high-level discussion in KIP-500: Replace ZooKeeper with a Self-Managed Metadata Quorum.

These efforts will take a few Kafka releases and additional KIPs. Kafka Controllers will take over the tasks of current ZooKeeper tasks. The Controllers will leverage the benefits of the Event Log which is a core concept of Kafka.

Some benefits of the new Kafka architecture are a simpler architecture, ease of operations, and better scalability e.g. allow "unlimited partitions".