Kafka requires only a single ZooKeeper instance to get started. Kafka's official quickstart actually walks you through running a local deployment of Kafka that has 1x Kafka broker and 1x ZK instance: https://kafka.apache.org/documentation/#quickstart

Yeah and it's not obvious that there's any way to get Kafka up and running without Zookeeper, or what their interaction is. And you can get Zookeeper and Kafka running on one machine, but it's such a pain and there's nothing to help really in the docs.

>And you can get Zookeeper and Kafka running on one machine, but it's such a pain and there's nothing to help really in the docs.

What sort of thing are you after? Like a getting started for production without creating footguns style how too?

More like getting started in a dev environment; I want to play with a technology on a laptop or my home compute machine sometimes before venturing into production or recommending it to clients.

Also, since you talked above about the "lack of documentation" to get up and running with a small Kafka deployment of only 1 broker and 1 ZK instance: this is covered in the Kafka quickstart, which is probably what most people will read when starting out with Kafka. See https://kafka.apache.org/documentation/#quickstart.

Perhaps you had a different issue though?

Why don't you run Kafka from a Docker image, like the Docker images provided by Confluent?https://docs.confluent.io/current/installation/docker/docs/