Kafka leader election in multi-dc with an arbiter/witness/observer

Question

I would like to deploy a Kafka cluster in two datacenters with the same number of nodes on each DC. The first DC is used in active mode while the second is in passive mode.

For example, let say that both datacenters have 3 nodes with 2 in-sync replica (ISR) on the first DC and one ISR on the second DC.

Is it possible to have a third DC containing an arbiter/witness/observer node such that in case of failure of one DC, a leader election can succeed with the correct outcome in term of consistency? mongoDB has such feature named Replica set Arbiter.

What about deploying ZooKeeper on the three datacenters? From my understanding ZooKeeper does not hold the Kafka data and it should not be contacted for each new record in the Kafka topic, i.e. you do not pay the latency to the third DC for each new record.

Answer 1

There is one presentation at the Kafka summit 2017 One Data Center is Not Enough: Scaling Apache Kafka Across Multiple Data Centers speaking about this setup. There is also some interesting information inside a Confluent whitepaper Disaster Recovery for Multi-Datacenter Apache Kafka® Deployments. It says it could work and they called it an observer node but it also says no one has ever tried this.

Zookeeper keeps tracks of the following metadata for Kafka (0.9.0+).

• Electing a controller - The controller is one of the brokers and is responsible for maintaining the leader/follower relationship for all the partitions. When a node shuts down, it is the controller that tells other replicas to become partition leaders to replace the partition leaders on the node that is going away. Zookeeper is used to elect a controller, make sure there is only one and elect a new one it if it crashes.
• Cluster membership - which brokers are alive and part of the cluster? this is also managed through ZooKeeper.
• Topic configuration - what overrides are there for that topic, where are the partitions located etc.
• Quotas - how much data is each client allowed to read and write
• ACLs - who is allowed to read and write to which topic

More detail on the dependency between Kafka and Zookeeper on the Kafka FAQ and answer at Quora from a Kafka commiter working at Confluent.

From the resources I have read, a setup with two DC (Kafka plus Zookeeper ) and an arbiter/witness/observer Zookeeper node on a third DC with high latency could work but I haven't found any resources that has actually experimented it.