Apache Kafka Producer Broker Connection : <p>I have a set of Kafka broker instances running as a cluster. I have a client that is producing data to Kafka:</p>

<pre><code>props.put("metadata.broker.list", "broker1:9092,broker2:9092,broker3:9092");
</code></pre>

<p>When we monitor using tcpdump, I can see that only the connections to broker1 and broker2 are ESTABLISHED while for the broker3, there is no connection from my producer. I have a single topic with just one partition.</p>

<p>My questions:</p>

<ol>
<li><p>How is the relation between number of brokers and topic partitions? Should I always have number of brokers = number of partitons?</p></li>
<li><p>Why in my case, I'm not able to connect to broker3? or atleast my network monitoring does not show that a connection from my Producer is established with broker3?</p></li>
</ol>

<p>It would be great if I could get some deeper insight into how the connection to the brokers work from a Producer stand point.</p>
