I find zookeeper to be the easy part. Managing Kafka’s byzantine auth systems, and applying upgrades to clients and servers that change a million things every release, and dealing with the shitstorm of gigabytes of text logs, and dealing with tuning mistakes (don’t you dare leave the file descriptor limit at the OS default!) just sucks up so much attention.

I thought Kafka stopped using zookeeper.

They're working toward that goal.

2.8.0 is out and it supports zk-less. But I'm not too sure the alternative is much better.

Confluent will tell you straight out it is not production ready. I know there are other common features not supported, but authorization for example is not supported in the current implementation. They told us 2 years before zook is dead dead.