replication factor: 1 larger than available brokers: 0 issue

[Rakesh Vidyadharan]

Hello,

We have been using Kafka 0.8.1 for a few months and this morning we started 
seeing a lot of these types of errors.  We started trying to publish messages 
to a few additional topics, but topic creation (automatic creation mode) always 
fails with the following type of error:

kafka.common.FailedToSendMessageException: Failed to send messages after 10 
tries.
        at 
kafka.producer.async.DefaultEventHandler.handle(DefaultEventHandler.scala:90)
        at kafka.producer.Producer.send(Producer.scala:76)

I then tried to create the topics manually using the kafka-topics.sh script, 
since a web search indicated that users who had seen issues in their own code 
were able to create topics using the script.  No luck there either:

Error while executing topic command replication factor: 1 larger than available 
brokers: 0
kafka.admin.AdminOperationException: replication factor: 1 larger than 
available brokers: 0
at kafka.admin.AdminUtils$.assignReplicasToBrokers(AdminUtils.scala:70)
at kafka.admin.AdminUtils$.createTopic(AdminUtils.scala:155)
at kafka.admin.TopicCommand$.createTopic(TopicCommand.scala:88)
at kafka.admin.TopicCommand$.main(TopicCommand.scala:50)
at kafka.admin.TopicCommand.main(TopicCommand.scala)

Kafka server logs had a lot of the following types of error messages:
[2015-06-24 14:40:15,669] ERROR [KafkaApi-0] error when handling request Name: 
TopicMetadataRequest; Version: 0; CorrelationId: 0; ClientId: ; Topics: 
metamorphosis.market (kafka.server.KafkaApis)
kafka.admin.AdminOperationException: replication factor: 1 larger than 
available brokers: 0
        at kafka.admin.AdminUtils$.assignReplicasToBrokers(AdminUtils.scala:70)
        at kafka.admin.AdminUtils$.createTopic(AdminUtils.scala:155)
        at 
kafka.server.KafkaApis$$anonfun$handleTopicMetadataRequest$2.apply(KafkaApis.scala:618)
        at 
kafka.server.KafkaApis$$anonfun$handleTopicMetadataRequest$2.apply(KafkaApis.scala:612)
        at scala.collection.immutable.Set$Set1.foreach(Set.scala:81)
        at 
kafka.server.KafkaApis.handleTopicMetadataRequest(KafkaApis.scala:612)
        at kafka.server.KafkaApis.handle(KafkaApis.scala:71)
        at kafka.server.KafkaRequestHandler.run(KafkaRequestHandler.scala:42)
        at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:745)

Any ideas on how we can work around this issue?

Thanks
Rakesh