At the time of writing, the stable version of Kafka is 0.9.x.
The prerequisites for running Kafka are a ZooKeeper ensemble and Java Version 1.7 or above. Kafka comes with a convenience script that can start a single node ZooKeeper but it is not recommended to use it in a production environment. We will be using the ZooKeeper cluster we deployed in Chapter 2, Storm Deployment, Topology Development, and Topology Options.
We will see how to set up a single node Kafka cluster first and then how to add two more nodes to it to run a full-fledged, three node Kafka cluster with replication enabled.
