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

Yes, Zookeeper is must by design for Kafka. Because Zookeeper has the responsibility a kind of managing Kafka cluster. It has list of all Kafka brokers with it. It notifies Kafka, if any broker goes down, or partition goes down or new broker is up or partition is up. In short ZK keeps every Kafka broker updated about current state of the Kafka cluster.

Then every Kafka client(producer/consumer) all need to do is connect with any single broker and that broker has all metadata updated by Zookeeper, so client need not to bother about broker discovery headache.