Metadata Management in Kafka
Metadata storage and leader elections for Apache Kafka® have traditionally handled by ZooKeeper, but starting in version 7.4.0, KRaft is the default mechanism for metadata management for new clusters.
For more details on what KRaft is, see KRaft Overview
For hardware requirements and how to configure and monitor KRaft see Configure KRaft in Production
For how to configure ZooKeeper for production use, see Configure ZooKeeper for Production