Differences between zookeeper-server-start.sh and kafka-server-start.sh

Question

Is one of them more recommended/preferred to use than the other?

Answer 1

Kafka uses Zookeeper so you must start a Zookeeper server before starting the Kafka broker. Zookeeper and Kafka broker are two distinct things and both of them are required in order to run a Kafka Cluster. Kafka is a distributed system and is built to use Zookeeper which is responsible for controller election, topic configuration, clustering etc.

In order to run Zookeeper you need to set the parameters in the configuration file config/zookeeper.properties and then start the ZK server using

bin/zookeeper-server-start.sh config/zookeeper.properties

Then you need to run at least one Kafka broker which can be configured in config/server.properties file and then start it using

bin/kafka-server-start.sh config/server.properties