**Zookeeper (pre-KRaft)**: (1) Broker registration and metadata. (2) Leader election for partitions. (3) Consumer group coordination (offsets, rebalance). (4) Topic config.
**KRaft (Kafka 3.x)**: Kafka Raft; replaces Zookeeper. Metadata in Kafka itself. Simpler ops.
**Why It Mattered**: Zookeeper was single point of coordination. Ensemble of 3, 5, or 7 for HA.
**Scalability Trade-offs**: Zookeeper session timeouts cause rebalance....
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