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