Kafka no longer requires zookeeper. If you need true master-master high availability from a datastore - which anyone who bothers with a load balancer for their application should demand, what's the point in running your application in a HA configuration if your datastore is a single point of failure - then to the best of my knowledge Kafka is still the least bad option available. It's not the easiest thing to operate, but I'll take it over Galera or Grenplum any day.