title: Why does kafka producer take a broker endpoint when being initialized instead of the zk
body: <p>If I have multiple brokers, which broker should my producer use? Do I need to manually switch the broker to balance the load? Also why does the consumer only need a zookeeper endpoint instead of a broker endpoint?</p>
  
  <p>quick example from tutorial:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt; bin/kafka-console-producer.sh --broker-list localhost:9092 --topic test 
  &gt; bin/kafka-console-consumer.sh --zookeeper localhost:2181 --topic test --from-beginning
  </code></pre>