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Redpanda Cloud Management MCP Server Quickstart

In this quickstart, you’ll get your Claude AI agent talking to Redpanda Cloud using the Redpanda Cloud Management MCP Server.

After completing this quickstart, you will be able to:

  • Authenticate to Redpanda Cloud with rpk

  • Install the MCP integration for Claude

  • Issue natural language commands to manage clusters

Prerequisites

Set up the MCP server

  1. Verify your rpk version.

    rpk version

    Ensure the version is at least 25.2.3.

  2. Log in to Redpanda Cloud.

    rpk cloud login

    A browser window opens. Sign in to grant access. After you sign in, rpk stores a token locally. This token is not shared with your AI agent. It is used by the MCP server to authenticate requests to your Redpanda Cloud account.

  3. Install the MCP integration. Choose one client:

    # Claude desktop
rpk cloud mcp install --client claude

# Claude Code (IDE)
rpk cloud mcp install --client claude-code

    This command configures the MCP server for your client. If you need to update the integration, re-run the install command for your client.

Start prompting

Launch Claude or Claude Code and try one of these prompts:

  • “Create a Redpanda Cloud cluster named dev-mcp.”

  • “List topics in dev-mcp.”

  • “Create a topic orders-raw with 6 partitions.”

The MCP server does not expose API endpoints that result in delete operations by default. Use --allow-delete only if you intentionally want to enable delete operations. See Enable delete operations.

Next steps