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You're right that they are functionally the same and that the one advantage of a partitioned topic with one partition is the ability to expand the number of partitions later. This is helpful when you think the amount of data going through the topic will increase. The two downsides to creating a partitioned topic with 1 partition is that it will take up more space in zookeeper because there is a small amount of extra metadata and it will require some additional LOOKUP commands when a client first connects to produce or consume from the topic (assuming they do not connect with the

-partition-0

topic name. The metadata is small, so I would assume that it won't make a big difference until you have many topics (I don't know how may is too many, so I recommend testing this in your env if you need to know). Also, the extra lookup should be pretty cheap.

Ah, thanks that perspective is helpful @Michael Marshall. I also realized that there are a separate set of admin commands used for partitioned topics which might be a bit burdensome for operations

That's a great point.