While the replication features in 0.8 are very desirable for us, one aspect of 0.7 that was also appealing was that in specific scenarios a single broker instance could run by itself without an accompanying Zookeeper.
This provided a lightweight "entry point" for log flows by running lots of single-instance Kafka brokers for local durability, then running other code (like MirrorMaker) to propagate local data from those single-instance brokers to shared broker clusters for further processing by other applications. Is this scenario no longer achievable with 0.8? Will it be on the roadmap again?