Why does kafka producer take a broker endpoint when being initialized instead of the zk

Question

If I have multiple brokers, which broker should my producer use? Do I need to manually switch the broker to balance the load? Also why does the consumer only need a zookeeper en

Answer 1

Kafka Producer API does not interact directly with Zookeeper. However, the High Level Consumer API connects to Zookeeper to fetch/update the partition offset information for each consumer. So, the consumer API would fail if it cannot connect to Zookeeper.