I am aware of lack of programmatic way of deleting topics in kafka 0.8.0. So using the sledge hammer approach. This is what I am doing:
1. Bring whole of my kafka cluster down. 2. Delete all the content on all the kafka clusters pointed via logs.dir setting. 3. Delete the topic metadata from zookeeper : rmr /brokers (note I am not wiping off the whole zookeeper but the znode /brokers where the kafka broker ids and topic metadata is stored) 4. Restart the kafka cluster again. One would expect that the kafka cluster will come up with no memory of any topic from previous. But guess what, and this is the place where I need help and need to understand, when the kafka cluster comes back, it somehow is able to obtain the info of the previous topics. It promptly goes ahead creating and assigning partitions/replicas to the brokers for the previous topics. Now I am completely at loss to understand where exactly is kafka able to get the info of previous topics when I have wiped it off the zookeeper and also dropped the logs.dir locations across the kafka cluster. An insight is much needed here. Where else is the topic meta data store which the kafka server is getting hold of after coming back alive? Regards, Virendra
