This value controls when a produce request is considered completed. Specifically, how many other brokers must have committed the data to their log and acknowledged this to the leader? Typical values are

0, which means that the producer never waits for an acknowledgement from the broker (the same behavior as 0.7). This option provides the lowest latency but the weakest durability guarantees (some data will be lost when a server fails).
1, which means that the producer gets an acknowledgement after the leader replica has received the data. This option provides better durability as the client waits until the server acknowledges the request as successful (only messages that were written to the now-dead leader but not yet replicated will be lost).
-1, The producer gets an acknowledgement after all in-sync replicas have received the data. This option provides the greatest level of durability. However, it does not completely eliminate the risk of message loss because the number of in sync replicas may, in rare cases, shrink to 1. If you want to ensure that some minimum number of replicas (typically a majority) receive a write, then you must set the topic-level min.insync.replicas setting. Please read the Replication section of the design documentation for a more in-depth discussion.