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Practical Results of a ZooKeeper-less Kafka

Paul Brebner does the math:

The Kafka cluster meta-data is now only stored in the Kafka cluster itself, making meta-data update operations faster and more scalable. The meta-data is also replicated to all the brokers, making failover from failure faster too. Finally, the active Kafka controller is now the Quorum Leader, using Raft for leader election.

The motivation for giving Kafka a “brain transplant” (replacing ZooKeeper with KRaft) was to fix scalability and performance issues, enable more topics and partitions, and eliminate the need to run an Apache ZooKeeper cluster alongside every Kafka cluster.

Read on for some initial testing of KRaft versus ZooKeeper.