[ewencp]

Agreed! It's not Docker, but I'm working on getting a decent Vagrant setup included with Kafka: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/KAFKA-1173 That supports pulling up a full cluster locally in VirtualBox or in EC2. Just a first cut, but it already makes testing a lot easier for me.

But in it's current state, that patch is a starting point that is really intended more for Kafka developers than for Kafka users. I really like what the Mesosphere folks have done -- great variety of OSes and cloud platforms, plus they do all the heavy lifting of bringing the cluster up for you.