I noticed that the standard Kafka storm spout gets topic metadata from zookeeper (under "/brokers/topics/") instead of issuing MetadataRequests to one of the brokers. Aside from possible encapsulation issues, are there any other downsides to using ZK this way? Are there significant cases where ZK can be out-of-sync with the brokers?
I can see that the high-level consumer gets is topic metadata by issuing MetadataRequests? to the brokers so I always assumed that was preferred. Thanks, Paul