Kafka Producer API: bootstrap.servers property value

Question

I am learning Kafka Producer API, and inside tutorials, they have mentioned "bootstrap.servers" is mandatory property to specify currently running brokers(by comma-separated value). I doubted why the producer provides all the brokers' list why not the producer provide zookeeper address and port and zookeeper will identify the broker.

Answer 1

Below are some reasons:

1. Increased Latency : Using zookeepers to talk to clients for read/write operations will cause additional latency, since zookeepers will act as mediators between clients and brokers
2. Increased Resource Requirements : In Kafka, Brokers do the heavy computations for management of topics data, if zookeepers acts as mediators, they will have to deal with heavy inflow and outflow of data resulting in an increase in resource (CPU/Memory) requirements for zookeepers.

Answer 2

Producer does not need to define all of the brokers. It is needed to provide only the subset and later the client will get the whole cluster topology from one of the servers (the active controller).

Answer 3

As of Kafka 0.9, Zookeeper is no longer required for client connections.The property used to be called zookeeper.connect and did serve the purpose of what you say - finding the brokers

The list of brokers is stored/returned by the Kafka server designated as the Controller, the list is not returned to clients by Zookeeper

The eventual goal is to remove Zookeeper from the architecture