Metadata Management in Kafka
Metadata storage and leader elections for Apache Kafka® have traditionally handled by ZooKeeper, but as of Confluent Platform 7.5, ZooKeeper is deprecated for new deployments.
You should now use KRaft mode for new deployments.
For more details on what KRaft is, see KRaft Overview
For hardware requirements and how to configure and monitor KRaft see KRaft Configuration Reference for Confluent Platform
For steps to migrate from ZooKeeper to KRaft (Early access), see Migrate from ZooKeeper to KRaft (EA)
For how to configure ZooKeeper for production use, see ZooKeeper Configuration Reference for Confluent Platform