//standard kafka deployment text
Apache Kafka components are provided for deployment to Kubernetes with the Strimzi distribution.
The Kafka components are generally run as clusters for availability.

A typical deployment incorporating Kafka components might include:

* *Kafka* cluster of broker nodes
* *ZooKeeper* cluster of replicated ZooKeeper instances
* *Kafka Connect* cluster for external data connections
* *Kafka MirrorMaker* cluster to mirror the Kafka cluster in a secondary cluster
* *Kafka Exporter* to extract additional Kafka metrics data for monitoring
* *Kafka Bridge* to make HTTP-based requests to the Kafka cluster
* *Cruise Control* to rebalance topic partitions across broker nodes

Not all of these components are mandatory, though you need Kafka and ZooKeeper as a minimum.
Some components can be deployed without Kafka, such as MirrorMaker or Kafka Connect.
