Apache Kafka uses ZooKeeper to be a highly distributed and scalable system. Zookeeper is used by Kafka to store various configurations and use them across the hadoop cluster in a distributed manner. To achieve distributed-ness, configurations are distributed and replicated throughout the leader and follower nodes in the ZooKeeper ensemble. We cannot directly connect to Kafka by bye-passing ZooKeeper because if the ZooKeeper is down it will not be able to serve the client request.
