How to load balance the Kafka Leadership?

Question

My kafka version is kafka_2.9.2-0.8.1.1. I have two brokers in the cluster, 4 topics and each topic has 4 partitions.

When I run

sh kafka-topics.sh --describe --zookeeper rhost:2181

for all the topics/partitions, I see broker 1 as Leader.

How can I load balance the leader?

For example, for topic 1 and topic 2 have broker 1 as leader and for topic 3 and topic 4 have broker 2 as leader.

Answer 1

The partitions should be automatically rebalanced, since the default value of the broker configuration parameter auto.leader.rebalance.enable is true. (see documentation)

However, by default this rebalance occurs every 5 minutes, as defined by the leader.imbalance.check.interval.seconds parameter. If you wish this to occur more frequently, you will have to modify this parameter.