KafkaProducer partitionsFor v/s KafkaAdminClient describeTopics

Hi All,

I need to know the number of partitions for a topic before
producing/consuming. Some users may set the number of partitions for a
given topic but some users may just set the number of partitions in
server.properties. It should work for both cases.

Which method is better for a production grade software:

1. KafkaProducer partitionsFor
2. KafkaAdminClient describeTopics: you need to extract the topic you are
interested in and get the partition info from the metadata.

A quick Google search tells me that describeTopics approach is more
comprehensive.

Also, will the use of KafkaProducer partitionsFor work for clustered
environments?

Thanks,
Anand