It is important to note that efforts are underway to rid Kafka of the Zookeeper dependency. Currently, Kafka uses Zookeeper to store its metadata about partitions and brokers and to elect a broker to be the Kafka Controller. These services provided by Zookeeper will be replaced by a quorum of controller nodes in the future. That way Kafka’s will not depend on an external system for configuration and election. More details can be found here.