meta.properties was likely left over from a previous instance of the kafka broker. Did you remove the broker role instances and recreate them on the same machine? When that happens, the broker.id changes and kafka won't start properly as a safety measure. A good rule of thumb is if you need to remove the role instances and recreate, then delete everything from the kafka data dir (unless you need to use the partitions), in which case, you'll have to update that meta.properties file manually. -pd ... View more