Hi Oliver, I was reading the mirroring guide and I wonder if it is required that the > mirror runs it's own zookeeper? > > We have a zookeeper cluster running which is used by different > applications, so can we use that zookeeper cluster for the kafka source and > kafka mirror? >
You could have a single zookeeper cluster and use different namespaces for the source/target mirror. However, I don't think it is recommended to use a remote zookeeper (if you have a cross-DC set up) since that would potentially mean very high ZK latencies on one of your clusters. > What is the procedure if the kafka source server fails to switch the > applications to use the mirrored instance? > I don't quite follow this question - can you clarify? The mirror cluster is pretty much a separate instance. There is no built-in automatic fail-over if your source cluster goes down. > Are there any backup best practices if we would not use mirroring? > You can use RAID arrays for (local) data redundancy. You may also be interested in the (intra-DC) replication feature (KAFKA-50) that is currently being developed. I believe some folks on this list have also used plain rsync's as an alternative to mirroring. Thanks, Joel
