[Verse 1]
In the old days Kafka had a friend
ZooKeeper helped from start to end
Broker registration, metadata store
Topic partitions, ACLs and more
[Verse 2]
Controller election, who's in charge today
ZooKeeper held the truth, showed the way
But running two systems side by side
Brought complexity we couldn't hide
[Chorus]
Why does KRaft exist, why the change
Two systems felt so strange
Metadata split in different places
Scaling up showed all the spaces
KIP five hundred came to save
One system, that's all we crave
[Verse 3]
Operations teams would pull their hair
Managing both systems everywhere
When metadata didn't match up right
Debugging took us through the night
[Verse 4]
Two hundred thousand partitions max
Hit the ceiling, felt the cracks
ZooKeeper's limits held us back
Scalability's what we lacked
[Chorus]
Why does KRaft exist, why the change
Two systems felt so strange
Metadata split in different places
Scaling up showed all the spaces
KIP five hundred came to save
One system, that's all we crave
[Bridge]
Simplify operations, that's the goal
Remove dependencies, take control
Self-managing metadata, all in one
Unified system, scaling's begun
[Chorus]
Why does KRaft exist, why the change
Two systems felt so strange
Metadata split in different places
Scaling up showed all the spaces
KIP five hundred came to save
One system, that's all we crave
[Outro]
No more ZooKeeper in the way
KRaft's here to save the day