Most of the problems that I have had are with the ZK clients and not the server. As long as you follow the operational documentation (there are a few basic rules) it hums along nicely. We have a few clusters with Kafka and have a decent process in Chef:
On the other hand, it's had its share of improperly handled split brain scenarios. I still think it has problems with partial split brain (where A and B can't talk, but C can talk to both of them).
Thanks for sharing the cookbook :) . Do you use Zookeeper for anything other than Kafka?
Zookeeper as a hard requirement feels like asking me to supply an entire container port to unload one container from a semi-trailer.