If we shutdown Zookeeper (e.g. to backup the ZK-Leader at rest) do we have to also stop the brokers? We could by administrative means prevent topic/ACL changes and broker starts during Zookeeper downtime.
If you shutdown Zookeeper, then Kafka would begin to fail under regular operations, so yes, you’ll want to first shutdown the brokers.
Exhibitor used to be a tool that could be used for regular Zookeeper snapshots, by the way