[dastbe]

Having distributed consensus as a distinct service (as opposed to directly building it into each application) is beneficial to a lot of companies because they can invest resources to make it operate well (in addition to being correct) and reap the benefits across all of their services. By well, I both mean having competent operations around the service as well as making it more resilient and faster to respond to various networking failures.

the downside is that in order to use something like kafka locally (afaik?) you have to run zookeeper locally as well.

[mioelnir]

Also, speaking with my sysadmin hat here, Zookeeper is an insanely powerful introspection point for running distributed services. The number of services with internal cluster coordination protocols that offer similar capabilities is abysmal.

[aries1980]

There are other service discovery tools than Zookeeper such as Consul.io, Etcd, etc.

[tcbawo]

The biggest benefit IMHO would be from making this a pluggable service within the Kafka client and server. Then, you're not tied into ZooKeeper explicitly.