title: Kafka Producers/Consumers over WAN?
body: <p>I have a Kafka Cluster in a data center. A bunch of clients that may communicate across WANs (even the internet) will send/receive real time messages to/from the cluster.</p>
  
  <p>I read from <a href="https://kafka.apache.org/08/ops.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Kafka's Documentation</a>:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>...It is possible to read from or write to a remote Kafka cluster over the WAN though TCP tuning will be necessary for high-latency links.</p>
    
    <p>It is generally not advisable to run a single Kafka cluster that spans multiple datacenters as <strong>this will incur very high replication latency both for Kafka writes and Zookeeper writes and neither Kafka nor Zookeeper will remain available if the network partitions.</strong></p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>From what I understand <a href="http://kafka.apache.org/documentation.html#api" rel="nofollow noreferrer">here</a> and <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27918065/why-do-kafka-consumers-connect-to-zookeeper-and-producers-get-metadata-from-bro/27919125#27919125">here</a>:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Producing over a WAN doesn't require ZK and is okay, just mind tweaks to TCP for high latency connections. Great! Check.</li>
  <li>The High Level consumer APIs require ZK connections.</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Aren't then clients reading/writing to Kafka over a WAN subject to the same limitations for clusters in <strong>bold</strong> above?</p>