Are all the redpanda nodes equal?

[mikeTWC1984]

In the N node cluster - are all the nodes participate in raft (play zookeeper role), or some nodes are just workers? As far as I remember it's recommended to have no more than 3 or 5 zookeeper nodes (to avoid expensive sync).

[emaxerrno]

hi @mikeTWC1984 - indeed! all nodes are the same. That's by design.

It doesn't mean all nodes do the same work! it just means that deploying redpanda is super easy.

Internally we figure out multiple roles.

1. coordinator for consumer groups
2. coordinator for the cluster / controller / for partition assignments
3. every partition is its own separate raft group
4. transaction coordinator
5. etc
6. etc

The list is very large, but you simply don't have to worry. This is figured out automatically during our bootstrap process.