SELF-HEALING A MESSAGE BROKERING CLUSTER

A system, apparatus, and methods are provided for self-healing and balancing partition distribution across nodes within a message broker cluster. During operation, the system receives a stream of messages at the message brokering cluster, wherein the message stream is divided into partitions and replicas for each partition are distributed among a set of nodes within the message brokering cluster. Responsive to a change in the number of nodes within the message brokering cluster, the system (1) determines a set of replicas to be migrated within the message brokering cluster, (2) divides the set of replicas into multiple chunks, wherein each chunk includes one or more of the replicas to be migrated to a new node, and (3) migrates the set of replicas one chunk at a time, wherein replicas not corresponding to the single chunk do not begin migrating until all replicas within the single chunk finish migrating.