Bypass Zookeeper in producer/consumer clients?

Question

This is a follow-up question to an earlier discussion. I think of Zookeeper as a coordinator for instances of the Kafka broker, or "message bus". I understand why we might want producer/consumer clients transacting through Zookeeper -- because Zookeeper has built-in fault-tolerance as to which Kafka broker to transact with. But with the new model -- ie, 0.10.1+ -- should we always bypass Zookeeper altogether in our producer/consumer clients? Are we giving up any advantages (Eg, better fault-tolerance) by doing that? Or is Zookeeper ultimately still at work behind the scenes?

Answer 1

Zookeeper is still at work behind the scenes but the 0.9+ clients don't need to worry about it anymore because consumer offsets are now stored in a Kafka topic rather than in zookeeper.