Depending on how many tenants you have using ZooKeeper you may be just fine with 3 nodes. In ZooKeeper, more nodes doesn't always yield better performance because of the communication overhead. Adding more nodes decreases write performance because of the node to node communication required to synchronize across the cluster. A few things to consider: 1. ZooKeeper will be more fault tolerant with 5 nodes vs 3 nodes. A 3 node cluster can only tolerate one down node before it loses its quorum. 2. Get the best performance out of your current 3 node deployment by following best practices. 4. Look at the current 3 node cluster performance under existing load and see the capacity you have. Check out this article. Add new kafka nodes and see how performance is affected. 3. Zookeeper needs an odd number of nodes and you will most likely not need to have more than 7. 4. Later versions of Kafka do not rely on zookeeper for consumer offsets. How Kafka uses ZooKeeper. This article describes the 0.10 release and later 5. Consider upgrading to HDP 3.0 and use Streams Messaging Manager. It makes managing Kafka a lot easier, but it only works on HDP 3.0 and above. Best of luck on your Kafka journey! ... View more

I resolved the issue by using a different browser. The version of Internet Explorer I was using did not work. I resolved the issue by allowing the 8080 port through the windows firewall and then connecting remotely using Chrome. ... View more