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

Zookeeper is centralizing and management system for any kind of distributed systems. Distributed system is different software modules running on different nodes/clusters (might be on geographically distant locations) but running as one system. Zookeeper facilitates communication between the nodes, sharing configurations among the nodes, it keeps track of which node is leader, which node joins/leaves, etc. Zookeeper is the one who keeps distributed systems sane and maintains consistency. Zookeeper basically is an orchestration platform.

Kafka is a distributed system. And hence it needs some kind of orchestration for its nodes that might be geographically distant (or not).