I'm new to Kafka, zookeeper and Storm. I our environment we have one Kafka broker connecting to multiple zookeepers. Is there an advantage having the producer send the messages to a specific topic and partition on one broker to multiple zookeepers vs multiple brokers to multiple zookeepers?
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Yes there is. Kafka allows you to scale by adding brokers. When you use a Kafka cluster with a single broker, as you have, all partitions reside on that single broker. But when you have multiple brokers, Kafka will split the partitions between them. So, broker A may be elected leader for partitions 1 and 2 of your topic, and broker B leader for partition 3. So, when you publish messages to the topic, the client will split the messages between the various partitions on the two brokers.
Note that I also mentioned leader election. Adding brokers to your Kafka cluster gives you replication. Kafka uses ZooKeeper to elect a leader for each partition as I mentioned in my example. Once a leader is elected, the client splits messages among partitions and sends each message to the leader for the appropriate partition. Depending on the topic configuration, the leader may synchronously replicate messages to a backup. So, in my example, if the replication factor for the topic is 2 then broker A will synchronously replicate messages for partitions 1 and 2 to broker B and broker B will synchronously replicate messages for partition 3 to broker A.
So, that's all to say that adding brokers gives you both scalability and fault-tolerance.
