Kafka on multiple instances of ec2

I am new to Kafka, trying to do a project. Wanted to do it as it would be in real life example, but I am kinda confused. While searching thru the internet I found that if I want to have 3 brokers and 3 zookeepers, to provide replication factor = 2 and quorum, I need 6 EC2 instances. I am looking thru youtube to find some examples, but as far as I see all of them show multiple brokers on one cluster. From my understanding it's better to keep ZKs and all brokers separately on each VM, so if one goes down I still have all of the rest. Can you confirm that ? Also, wondering how to set partitioning. Is it important at the beginning of creating a topic, or I change that later when I need to scale ? Thanks in advance

Feb 2, 2025 - 11:43

I am new to Kafka, trying to do a project. Wanted to do it as it would be in real life example, but I am kinda confused. While searching thru the internet I found that if I want to have 3 brokers and 3 zookeepers, to provide replication factor = 2 and quorum, I need 6 EC2 instances. I am looking thru youtube to find some examples, but as far as I see all of them show multiple brokers on one cluster. From my understanding it's better to keep ZKs and all brokers separately on each VM, so if one goes down I still have all of the rest. Can you confirm that ?

Also, wondering how to set partitioning. Is it important at the beginning of creating a topic, or I change that later when I need to scale ?

Thanks in advance