We ran into additional troubles based on ZK client bugs in the version that Kafka used. It would only ever resolve the ZK hostname once, at startup. Our worka

We ran into additional troubles based on ZK client bugs in the version that Kafka used. It would only ever resolve the ZK hostname once, at startup. Our workaround required some additional work to allocate an EIP for each host (3 AZs -> 3 EIPs) and then have the ZK host grab the EIP on startup. Even though Netflix hasn't updated it in a while, Exhibitor was helpful as well, in that it allowed ZK to bootstrap nodes off of state stored in S3. That did come at the cost of an extra 2-3 minutes per node on initial quorum startup.