Redpanda Cloud Overview
Redpanda Cloud is a complete data streaming and agentic data plane platform delivered as a fully-managed service. It provides automated upgrades and patching, data balancing, and support while continuously monitoring your data to meet strict performance, availability, reliability, and security requirements. All Redpanda Cloud clusters are deployed with an integrated Redpanda Console, and all clusters have access to unlimited retention and 300+ data connectors with Redpanda Connect.
Redpanda Agentic Data Plane (ADP)
Redpanda ADP is enterprise-grade infrastructure for building, deploying, and governing AI agents at scale. It combines Redpanda’s streaming-native immutable log, 300+ data connectors, and declarative agent definitions into a unified platform with built-in governance, cost controls, and compliance-grade audit trails.
Redpanda ADP includes the following key components:
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AI agents: Declare the behavior you want instead of writing code. Redpanda powers declarative definitions with 300+ connectors.
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MCP servers: Translate agent intent into connections to your business systems using proven connectors, no glue code required.
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Transcripts: End-to-end execution records built on an immutable log with formal correctness guarantees. Transcripts are the keystone of agent governance.
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AI Gateway: High-availability model routing with fiscal controls and per-tenant cost attribution across LLM providers.
For more information, see Redpanda Agentic Data Plane Overview.
| Redpanda Agentic Data Plane is supported only on BYOC clusters running with AWS and Redpanda version 25.3+. It is currently in limited availability. |
Redpanda Cloud deployment options
Redpanda Cloud applications are supported by three fully-managed deployment options:
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Serverless: Fastest way to get started with automatic scaling
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Dedicated: Production clusters in Redpanda’s cloud with enhanced isolation
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Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC): Maximum control and security by deploying in your own cloud environment
Quick comparison
| Serverless | Dedicated | BYOC | |
|---|---|---|---|
Best for |
Starter projects and applications with low or variable traffic |
Production clusters requiring cloud hosting, higher throughput, and extra isolation |
Production clusters requiring data sovereignty, the highest throughput, and added security |
Deployment |
Redpanda’s cloud (AWS/GCP) |
Redpanda’s cloud (AWS/Azure/GCP)[1] |
Your cloud account (AWS/Azure/GCP) |
Redpanda ADP |
✗ |
✗ |
✓ |
Tenancy |
Multi-tenant |
Single-tenant |
Single-tenant |
99.9% |
99.99%, multi-AZ |
99.99%, multi-AZ |
|
Max throughput (write, read) |
Up to 100 MB/s, 300 MB/s |
Up to 400 MB/s, 800 MB/s |
Up to 2 GB/s, 4 GB/s |
Partitions, pre-replication |
Up to 5,000 |
Up to 45,600 |
Up to 112,500 |
Max message size (MiB) |
8 (default), 20 (max) |
20 (default), 32 (max) |
20 (default), 32 (max) |
Private networking |
✓ |
✓ |
✓ |
SSO authentication |
✓ (GitHub, Google) |
✓ (GitHub, Google, OIDC) |
✓ (GitHub, Google, OIDC) |
Redpanda Connect |
✓ |
✓ |
✓ |
Role-based access control (RBAC) & audit logs |
✗ |
✓ |
✓ |
Group-based access control (GBAC) |
✗ |
✓ |
✓ |
Prometheus/OpenMetrics endpoint for cluster metrics |
✓ |
✓ |
✓ |
Multiple availability zones (AZs) |
✗ |
✓ |
✓ |
Cluster properties editing |
✗ |
✓ (AWS/GCP) |
✓ (AWS/GCP) |
Kafka Connect |
✗ |
✓ (disabled by default) |
✓ (disabled by default) |
Redpanda Support |
Enterprise support with annual contracts |
Enterprise support |
Enterprise support for BYOC; Premium support required for BYOVPC/BYOVNet |
|
Serverless
Serverless is the fastest and easiest way to start data streaming. With Serverless clusters, you host your data in Redpanda’s VPC, and Redpanda handles automatic scaling, provisioning, operations, and maintenance. This is a production-ready deployment option with a cluster available instantly, and you only pay for what you consume.
|
Sign up for Serverless
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Free trial
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Redpanda Sales
-
AWS Marketplace
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Google Cloud Marketplace
A free trial on AWS is the fastest way to get started with Serverless. Each free-trial customer qualifies for $100 (USD) in credits to spend in the first 30 days. This should be enough to run Redpanda with reasonable throughput. No credit card is required. To continue using Serverless after your trial expires, you can enter a credit card and pay as you go. Any remaining credit balance is used before you are charged.
When either the credits expire or the days in the trial expire, the clusters move into a suspended state, and you won’t be able to access your data in either the Redpanda Cloud Console or with the Kafka API. There is a seven-day grace period following the end of the trial when you can add your credit card and restore service. After that, the data is permanently deleted. For questions about the trial, use the #serverless Community Slack channel.
After you start a trial, Redpanda instantly prepares an account for you. Your account includes a welcome cluster with a hello-world demo topic you can explore. It includes sample data so you can see how real-time messaging works before sending your own data.
Get started by creating a Redpanda Connect pipeline, or by following the steps in the Console to use rpk to interact with your cluster from the command line:
-
Log in with
rpk cloud login. -
Consume from the
hello-worldtopic withrpk topic consume hello-world. -
In the Redpanda Cloud Console, navigate to the Topics page and open the
hello-worldtopic to see the included messages.
To request a private offer with possible discounts for annual committed use, contact Redpanda Sales. When you subscribe to Serverless through Redpanda Sales, you gain immediate access to Enterprise support.
Redpanda creates a cloud organization for you and sends you a welcome email.
New subscriptions to Redpanda Cloud through AWS Marketplace receive $300 (USD) in free credits to spend in the first 30 days. AWS Marketplace charges for anything beyond $300, unless you cancel the subscription. After your free credits have been used, you can continue using your cluster without any commitment, only paying for what you consume and canceling anytime.
| When you subscribe to Redpanda through AWS Marketplace, you do not have immediate access to Enterprise support, only the Community Slack channel. For Enterprise support, contact Redpanda Sales. |
Redpanda creates a cloud organization for you and sends you a welcome email.
New subscriptions to Redpanda Cloud through Google Cloud Marketplace receive $300 (USD) in free credits to spend in the first 30 days. Google Cloud Marketplace charges for anything beyond $300, unless you cancel the subscription. After your free credits have been used, you can continue using your cluster without any commitment, only paying for what you consume and canceling anytime.
| When you subscribe to Redpanda through Google Cloud Marketplace, you do not have immediate access to Enterprise support, only the Community Slack channel. For Enterprise support, contact Redpanda Sales. |
Redpanda creates a cloud organization for you and sends you a welcome email.
Dedicated
With Dedicated clusters, you host your data on Redpanda Cloud resources (AWS, GCP, or Azure), and Redpanda handles provisioning, operations, and maintenance. When you create a Dedicated cluster, you select the supported tier that meets your compute and storage needs.
Sign up for Dedicated
-
Redpanda Sales
-
AWS Marketplace
-
Google Cloud Marketplace
To request a private offer with possible discounts for monthly or annual committed use, contact Redpanda Sales. With a usage-based billing commitment, you sign up for a minimum spend amount through AWS Marketplace, Azure Marketplace, or Google Cloud Marketplace.
Redpanda creates a cloud organization for you and sends you a welcome email. You can then provision Dedicated clusters in Redpanda Cloud, and you can view invoices and manage your subscription in the marketplace.
New subscriptions to Redpanda Cloud through AWS Marketplace receive $300 (USD) in free credits to spend in the first 30 days. AWS Marketplace charges for anything beyond $300, unless you cancel the subscription. After your free credits have been used, you can continue using your cluster without any commitment, only paying for what you consume and canceling anytime.
Redpanda creates a cloud organization for you and sends you a welcome email.
New subscriptions to Redpanda Cloud through Google Cloud Marketplace receive $300 (USD) in free credits to spend in the first 30 days. Google Cloud Marketplace charges for anything beyond $300, unless you cancel the subscription. After your free credits have been used, you can continue using your cluster without any commitment, only paying for what you consume and canceling anytime.
Redpanda creates a cloud organization for you and sends you a welcome email.
Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC)
With BYOC clusters, the Redpanda data plane (including Redpanda ADP components and Redpanda brokers) deploys into your existing VPC or VNet, ensuring all data remains in your environment.
With BYOC clusters, you deploy the Redpanda data plane into your existing VPC (for AWS and GCP) or VNet (for Azure), and all data is contained in your own environment. This provides an additional layer of security and isolation. (See BYOC Architecture.) Redpanda manages provisioning, monitoring, upgrades, and security policies, including the underlying infrastructure and Kubernetes used to run the cluster. Redpanda also manages required resources in your VPC or VNet, including subnets (subnetworks in GCP), IAM roles, and object storage resources (for example, S3 buckets or Azure Storage accounts). For full details, see Upgrades and Maintenance.
Bring Your Own VPC/VNet (BYOVPC/BYOVNet)
With BYOVPC/BYOVNet clusters, you take full control of the networking lifecycle. Compared to standard BYOC, BYOVPC/BYOVNet provides more security, but the configuration is more complex. See the shared responsibility model to understand what you manage versus what Redpanda manages.
The BYOC infrastructure that Redpanda manages should not be used to deploy any other workloads.
For details about the control plane - data plane framework in BYOC, see BYOC architecture.
Sign up for BYOC
To start using BYOC, contact Redpanda sales to request a private offer with possible discounts. You are billed directly or through Google Cloud Marketplace or AWS Marketplace.
Serverless vs BYOC/Dedicated
Serverless clusters are a good fit for the following use cases:
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Quick setup for development or testing
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Variable or unpredictable traffic patterns
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No upfront cost commitment
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Isolated environments for different applications
Consider BYOC or Dedicated if you need more control over the deployment or if you have workloads with consistently-high throughput. BYOC and Dedicated clusters offer the following features:
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Redpanda Agentic Data Plane (ADP): BYOC only
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Multiple availability zones (AZs). A multi-AZ cluster provides higher resiliency in the event of a failure in one of the zones.
-
Role-based access control (RBAC) in the data plane
-
Group-based access control (GBAC)
-
Kafka Connect
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Higher limits and quotas. See BYOC usage tiers and Dedicated usage tiers compared to Serverless limits.
Redpanda Cloud architecture
When you sign up for a Redpanda account, Redpanda creates an organization for you. Your organization contains all your Redpanda resources, including your clusters and networks. Within your organization, Redpanda creates a default resource group to contain your resources. You can rename this resource group, and you can create more resource groups. For example, you may want different resource groups for production and testing.
|
For more detailed information about the Redpanda platform, see Introduction to Redpanda and How Redpanda Works. |
Shared responsibility model
The Redpanda Cloud shared responsibility model lists the security areas owned by Redpanda and the security areas owned by customers. Responsibilities depend on the type of deployment.
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BYOC
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BYOVPC/BYOVNet
-
Dedicated
| Resource | Redpanda responsibility | Customer responsibility |
|---|---|---|
Redpanda upgrades and hotfixes |
✓ |
|
Cost management and attribution |
✓ |
✓ |
Software vulnerability remediation |
✓ |
|
Infrastructure vulnerability remediation |
✓ |
|
IAM (roles, service accounts, access segmentation) |
✓ |
✓ |
Compute |
✓ |
|
Redpanda agent VM maintenance |
✓ |
|
VPC (subnets, routing, firewall) |
✓ |
✓ |
VPC peering |
✓ |
|
VPC private links (service endpoint) |
✓ |
|
VPC private links (consumer endpoint) |
✓ |
|
Local storage |
✓ |
|
Tiered Storage |
✓ |
|
Control plane |
✓ |
|
Access controls and audit |
✓ |
✓ |
Managed disaster recovery |
✓ |
|
Observability and monitoring (SLOs, SLIs, tracing, alerting, runbooks) |
✓ |
|
Availability service-level agreement (SLA) |
✓ (subject to required access to customer resources) |
|
Proactive threat detection |
✓ |
✓ |
Static secret rotation |
✓ |
|
Incident response |
✓ |
|
Resilience verification |
✓ |
|
Kafka Connect infrastructure |
✓ |
✓ |
Kafka Connect tasks state |
✓ |
| Resource | Redpanda responsibility | Customer responsibility |
|---|---|---|
Redpanda upgrades and hotfixes |
✓ |
|
Cost management and attribution |
✓ |
✓ |
Software vulnerability remediation |
✓ |
|
Infrastructure vulnerability remediation |
✓ |
✓ |
IAM (roles, service accounts, access segmentation) |
✓ |
|
Compute |
✓ |
|
Redpanda agent VM maintenance |
✓ |
|
VPC (subnets, routing, firewall) |
✓ |
|
VPC peering |
✓ |
|
VPC private links (service endpoint) |
✓ |
|
VPC private links (consumer endpoint) |
✓ |
|
Local storage |
✓ |
|
Tiered Storage |
✓ |
|
Control plane |
✓ |
|
Access controls and audit |
✓ |
✓ |
Managed disaster recovery |
✓ |
|
Observability and monitoring (SLOs, SLIs, tracing, alerting, runbooks) |
✓ |
✓ (for VPC components and cloud storage buckets/containers managed by customer) |
Availability SLA |
✓ (subject to required access to customer resources) |
✓ |
Proactive threat detection |
✓ |
✓ |
Static secret rotation |
✓ |
✓ |
Incident response |
✓ |
|
Resilience verification |
✓ |
|
Kafka Connect infrastructure |
✓ |
✓ |
Kafka Connect tasks state |
✓ |
| Resource | Redpanda responsibility | Customer responsibility |
|---|---|---|
Redpanda upgrades and hotfixes |
✓ |
|
Cost management and attribution |
✓ |
|
Software vulnerability remediation |
✓ |
|
Infrastructure vulnerability remediation |
✓ |
|
IAM (roles, service accounts, access segmentation) |
✓ |
|
Compute |
✓ |
|
Redpanda agent VM maintenance |
✓ |
|
VPC (subnets, routing, firewall) |
✓ |
|
VPC peering |
✓ |
|
VPC private links (service endpoint) |
✓ |
|
VPC private links (consumer endpoint) |
✓ |
|
Local storage |
✓ |
|
Tiered Storage |
✓ |
|
Control plane |
✓ |
|
Access controls and audit |
✓ |
|
Managed disaster recovery |
✓ |
|
Observability and monitoring (SLOs, SLIs, tracing, alerting, runbooks) |
✓ |
|
Availability SLA |
✓ |
|
Proactive threat detection |
✓ |
|
Static secret rotation |
✓ |
|
Incident response |
✓ |
|
Resilience verification |
✓ |
|
Kafka Connect infrastructure |
✓ |
|
Kafka Connect tasks state |
✓ |
Redpanda Connect and Kafka Connect
Redpanda Connect lets you compose pipelines from a rich library of inputs, processors, and outputs with strong metrics, logging, and per-pipeline scaling. To try it, see the quickstart.
Kafka Connect is disabled by default on all new clusters. To unlock this feature for your BYOC or Dedicated cluster, contact Redpanda Support. When enabled, a Kafka Connect node runs even if no connectors are configured.
| Data transforms | Redpanda Connect | |
|---|---|---|
Best for |
Simple, stateless, per-record normalization inside Redpanda |
Enrichment/lookup with external services; multi-stage flows |
External I/O |
Not permitted (sandboxed) |
Native (HTTP/database/object storage) |
Topology |
1:1 or 1:N (no cross-topic fan-in) |
Fan-in and fan-out; multi-step pipelines |
Ordering |
Preserves per-partition order |
Per-partition order can be preserved; configure parallelism and batching accordingly |
Scale & isolation |
Shares broker CPU/memory; best for lightweight operations |
Scales independently; isolates heavy work from brokers |
Failure handling |
You code routing/error behavior |
Built-in retries/backoff and DLQ patterns |
|
Redpanda Connect vs data transforms
Data transforms (Wasm) provide lightweight, per-record changes between Redpanda topics with minimal latency. Transforms run inside the broker, map one input topic to one or more output topics, and are intentionally sandboxed (no external network or disk access). They’re ideal for validation, redaction, format/schema conversion, and simple routing.
Redpanda Cloud vs Self-Managed feature compatibility
Because Redpanda Cloud is a fully-managed service that provides maintenance, data and partition balancing, upgrades, and recovery, much of the cluster maintenance required for Self-Managed users is not necessary for Redpanda Cloud users. Also, Redpanda Cloud is opinionated about Kafka configurations. For example, automatic topic creation is disabled. Some systems expect the Kafka service to automatically create topics when a message is produced to a topic that doesn’t exist. (You can enable this for BYOC and Dedicated clusters with the auto_create_topics_enabled cluster property.)
New clusters in Redpanda Cloud generally include functionality added in Self-Managed versions immediately. Existing clusters include new functionality when they get upgraded to the latest version.
Redpanda Cloud deployments do not support the following functionality available in Redpanda Streaming deployments:
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Kafka API OIDC authentication. However, Redpanda Cloud does support SSO to the Redpanda Cloud UI.
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Admin API.
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FIPS-compliance mode.
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Kerberos authentication.
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Redpanda debug bundles.
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Redpanda Console topic documentation.
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Manual deserialization of Schema Registry
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Configuring access to object storage with customer-managed encryption key.
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Kubernetes Helm chart and Redpanda Operator functionality.
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The following
rpkcommands:-
rpk cluster health -
rpk cluster license -
rpk cluster maintenance -
rpk cluster partitions -
rpk cluster self-test -
rpk cluster storage restore(Butrpk cluster storageand subcommands for mountable topics are supported in BYOC and Dedicated clusters) -
rpk connect -
rpk container -
rpk debug -
rpk generate app(This is supported in Serverless clusters only.) -
rpk iotune -
rpk redpanda -
rpk topic describe-storage(All otherrpk topiccommands are supported on both Redpanda Cloud and Self Managed.)The rpk cloudcommands are not supported in Self-Managed deployments.
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Features in limited availability
Features in limited availability are production-ready and are covered by Redpanda Support for early adopters.
The following features are currently in limited availability in Redpanda Cloud:
Features in beta
Features in beta are available for testing and feedback. They are not covered by Redpanda Support and should not be used in production environments.
The following features are currently in beta in Redpanda Cloud:
