To support some uses cases, kroxy needs to be elect a leader proxy. An example use-case is partition limit validation, where in order to properly enforce a count in a thread safe fashion, we need to route all 'create topic' requests through a single proxy instance which can then maintain a count in partition count in a thread safe manner.

The idea is to use jgroups to have all the kroxies elect a leader. We also considered leaning on Kafka itself for leader election, but these APIs are currently undergoing changes (KIP link) so we thought it wise to use an alternative mechanism until APIs are settled again.