Kafak has a rack awareness feature that allows brokers and consumers to communicate about the rack (or AWS Availability Zone) they're located in. Reading from a local broker can save money in bandwidth and improve latency for your consumers.
This improvement proposes that a Kafka Consumer could be configured with a callback that could be run when it's being configured on the task manager, that will set the appropriate value at runtime if a value is provided. More detail about this proposal can be found at https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/FLINK/FLIP-268%3A+Kafka+Rack+Awareness More information about the Kafka rack awareness feature is at https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/KIP-708%3A+Rack+awareness+for+Kafka+Streams Best, Jeremy
