Integration / Apache Pulsar Interview questions
What is Pulsar's metadata store used for?
The metadata store (traditionally ZooKeeper, though Pulsar also supports other backends) holds cluster-wide coordination state - broker membership, topic-to-broker ownership assignments, namespace policies, and BookKeeper ledger metadata locations.
Brokers watch the metadata store to know which topics they own and to detect when other brokers join or leave the cluster, which is how load rebalancing and failover decisions get triggered.
It does not store message data itself - that's BookKeeper's job - so metadata store load stays comparatively light and predictable even as message throughput scales.
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