Kafka brokers and Zookeeper

Learn about the types of data maintained in Zookeeper by the brokers.

The broker, topic, and partition information are maintained in Zookeeper. In particular, the partition information, including partition and replica locations, updates fairly frequently. Because of frequent metadata refreshes, the connection between the brokers and the Zookeeper cluster needs to be reliable. Similarly, if the Zookeeper cluster has other intensive processes running on it, that can add sufficient latency to the broker/Zookeeper interactions to cause issues.

• Kafka Controller maintains leadership through Zookeeper (shown in orange)
• Kafka Brokers also store other relevant metadata in Zookeeper (also in orange)
• Kafka Partitions maintain replica information in Zookeeper (shown in blue)