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Another alternative is to do exactly this KIP, but without the deprecation of --zookeeper. That would have a higher long term maintenance burden, and would prevent any future plans to, for example, provide alternative cluster technologies than ZooKeeper.

An alterTopics() AdminClient API, mirroring the existing createTopics() API, was considered, but:

• Some calls to alterTopics() (such as increasing the partition count) would have been synchronous, while others (such as moving replicas between brokers) would have been long running and thus asynchronous. This made for an API which synchronousness depended on the arguments.
• createTopics() allows to specify topic configs, whereas alterConfigs() is already provided to change topic configs, so it wasn't an exact mirror

Just providing reassignPartitions() was considered, with changes to partition count and replication factor inferred from partitions and brokers present in the assignments argument. This would require the caller to provide an assignment of partitions to brokers, but the AdminClient doesn't provide methods to obtain the necessary information to make an informed decision (what it the load on the brokers, how much free disk space do they have, or how many partitions are they already hosting), so it was felt better to retain alterPartitionCounts() and alterReplicationFactors() for the time being.