Installing kafka / zookeeper

Its almost a month since I left Google and joined the startup, and its been 30 days of new challenges every day, some I handled beautifully and others strugglingly. Today after a very very long time I got to work with actual linux machine. I had to install Zookeeper and Kafka on 3 AWS EC2 machines. Of course these being well known apache projects had instructions everywhere. But when was the last time open source project instructions worked flawlessly! It was great to finally get the system working, hack away into the /etc/hosts files, try different things.
On to next challenge tomorrow - convert the 3 single-node machines into a single cluster.