title: Understanding kafka broker vs zookeper
body: <p>I notice that when sending messages to kafka (a producer) the samples show connecting to port 9092 -- writing directly to a broker.  When consuming the examples show connecting to port 2181, presumably zookeeper.</p>
  
  <p>The latter makes sense--I want to read from "the cluster", letting zookeeper figure out which broker the client should communicate with, and managing such things as knowing who's alive/dead in the cluster.</p>
  
  <p>Why wouldn't publish/writes work the same way, i.e. write to "the cluster" (via zookeeper)?</p>
  
  <p>Am I understanding this correctly, that for producing I'm bypassing zookeeper (cluster knowledge) and must know producer nodes (and presumably figure out what to do if one fails)?</p>