Automatically update brokerstring in MSK

Question

A customer is looking to migrate their kafka workload to MSK. they have a question on how to mange the broker strings when a scaling event occurs in the cluster. for example:
the producer has a config which has a property:   
`bootstrap.servers`={comma separated string of  3 broker urls}

now a scaling event occurs and now you have another broker. 
Now the ugly way is to update the brokerstring url section manually.

the other option is to use a round robin DNS or an ALB and all the clients(producers/consumers) talk to the endpoint and behind the scenes it maintains the broker strings.

though i doubt if second option is doable since MSK is managed.  or may be i am understanding it incorrectly?

Looking for some guidance on how this scenario is solved for other customers.

Deepesh_M · Accepted Answer

Is there a specific reason why they want to add newly added broker into the brokerstring?

The use of `bootstrap.servers` by producer/consumer is to get the metadata of the Kafka cluster i.e. list of brokers, partition/offset information to discover the Kafka cluster. Any broker can be bootstrap server because every broker receives metadata information.

To summarize, it is not necessary to update bootstrap servers every time a new broker is added. The producers/consumers can still operate with existing brokerstring of limited brokers

Automatically update brokerstring in MSK

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