I'm creating this issue as a starting point for conversation on this topic, I looked for existing issues/pages talking about the potential to upgrade these dependencies but didn't find any.

DMaaP currently uses Kafka 0.8.2.1 (released March 2015) and Zookeeper 3.4.6 (released March 2014).  Some significant new features were added to Kafka, and Zookeeper (to a lesser extent) since these releases that might be of interest to the ONAP community.

A few examples of what Kafka has added are: a new Streams API, improvements to health-check and connect metrics, and support for exactly-once delivery.

From a platform perspective, numerous security improvements and Java 9 support are now also complete.