[smarterclayton]

The difference is that Kubernetes isn’t a data store - we’d have to implement the full functionality of etcd. Kafka is a full featured data store that doesn’t need 80% of what zookeeper does.

This was actually an early complaint leveled against Kubernetes for things like proxying at the node level or implementing DNS. “Don’t reinvent the wheel!” Sometimes better administrative experiences exist only after a component absorbs some function previous systems expose.

Sometimes it’s better to own the parts of the problem that make your system simpler.

[justicezyx]

No etcd don't need to be replicated for k8s API server.

Basically versioning + some form of fault tolerance is sufficient for k8s API server.