Over the past few years, Apache Kafka has emerged as the top event streaming platform for streaming data/event ingestion. However, in an earlier version of Apache Kafka, 3.5, Zookeeper was the additional and mandatory component for managing and coordinating the Kafka cluster. Relying on ZooKeeper on the operational multi-node Kafka cluster introduced complexity and could be a single point of failure. 

ZooKeeper is completely a separate system having its own configuration file syntax, management tools, and deployment patterns. In-depth skills with experience are necessary to manage and deploy two individual distributed systems and an eventually up-and-running Kafka cluster. Having expertise in Kafka administration without ZooKeeper won’t be able to help to come out from the crisis, especially in the production environment where ZooKeeper runs in a completely isolated environment (Cloud).