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In the post-ZK world, cluster membership is integrated with metadata updates. Brokers cannot continue to be members of the cluster if they cannot receive metadata updates. While it is still possible for a broker to be partitioned from a particular client, the broker will be removed from the cluster if it is partitioned from the controller.
Broker States
Offline
When the broker process is in the Offline state, it is either not running at all, or in the process of performing single-node tasks needed to starting up such as initializing the JVM or performing log recovery.
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