Why does kafka producer take a broker endpoint when being initialized instead of the zk

Question

If I have multiple brokers, which broker should my producer use? Do I need to manually switch the broker to balance the load? Also why does the consumer only need a zookeeper en

Answer 1

All above answers are correct in older versions of Kafka, but things have changed with arrival of Kafka 0.9.

Now there is no longer any direct interaction with zookeeper from either the producer or consumer. Another interesting things is with 0.9, Kafka has removed the dissimilarity between High-level and Low-level APIs, since both follows a uniformed consumer API.