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The main reason for making them separate requests is to have better separation of concerns.  Fetching metadata is logically a bit different than sending a heartbeat, and coupling them could result in a messy design and code.  We would have to add significant extra complexity to the FetchRequest schema.  Perhaps even worse, we would need to make the timing of fetch requests line up with the timing needed for broker heartbeats.

Shared IDs between Multiple Nodes

One possibility that we've discussed is whether we could have controller IDs and broker IDs share the same ID space.  For example, could there be both a broker 1 and a controller 1?  This is not a good idea because NetworkClient assumes a single ID space.  So if there is both a controller 1 and a broker 1, we don't have a way of picking the "right" one.  We would have to add a concept of node types.  That is a fair amount of extra work.  It also is a bit conceptually messy for the network layer to understand node types, rather than just treating them all as endpoints.

A related question is whether a broker and a controller could share the same port, if they are co-located in the same JVM.  We discussed this as part of KIP-590 and agreed that we would not share ports.  A shared port would make it impossible to have separate RPC handlers, complicating the code.  It would also make it impossible to have separate, stricter authentication for controllers.  Sharing a port with the broker opens us up to denial of service attacks, including unintentional ones.