What is the function of Zookeeper in Kafka?

6 months ago

2 minutes

Zookeeper in Kafka is primarily used to coordinate and manage the state and configuration information of the Kafka cluster. Specifically, Zookeeper plays several important roles in Kafka, including:

Maintaining cluster metadata: Zookeeper stores metadata information for the Kafka cluster, including the list of brokers, partition information for topics, and consumer group offset information.
Monitoring the health of the cluster: Zookeeper is responsible for monitoring the status of each node in the Kafka cluster and detecting when nodes go online or offline.
In a Kafka cluster, each partition has a leader responsible for handling read and write requests. If the leader node fails, Zookeeper assists in electing a new leader to ensure the cluster continues to run smoothly.
Managing consumer group offsets: When consumer groups consume messages, they need to keep track of the offset of messages they have already consumed. Zookeeper is used to store this offset information so that consumers can resume from where they left off in case of a consumer restart or failure.

Overall, Zookeeper plays a crucial role in Kafka, ensuring high availability and consistency of the Kafka cluster.