Apache Kafka needs to be running before producers and consumers can start communicating using it. Apache Kafka makes use of Apache ZooKeeper for maintaining configuration information, naming, providing distributed synchronization, and providing group services in a decentralized manner. The default Apache Kafka packaging downloaded in the technical requirements section will have Apache ZooKeeper bundled with it. The following command can be used to start Apache ZooKeeper with its default configuration.

To run Apache ZooKeeper on Linux/Unix, we use the following command:

$ <Absolute Path To Kafka>/bin/zookeeper-server-start.sh ../config/zookeeper.properties