Connect

Enterprise Licensing

You need a valid Enterprise Edition license to use the following enterprise features:

Feature Description

Feature	Description
Allow or deny lists	Limit the Redpanda Connect components that users can run within data pipelines on a Redpanda Connect instance.
Enterprise connectors	Additional inputs, outputs, and processors available only to enterprise customers.
FIPS compliance	Run Redpanda Connect using a FIPS-compliant version of `rpk`, the Redpanda command-line interface (CLI).
Redpanda Connect configuration service	A configuration block that you can use to send logs and status events to a topic on a Redpanda cluster.
Secrets management	Retrieve secrets values from a remote system, such as a secret management solution, without setting environment variables.

Allow or deny lists

Limit the Redpanda Connect components that users can run within data pipelines on a Redpanda Connect instance.

Enterprise connectors

Additional inputs, outputs, and processors available only to enterprise customers.

FIPS compliance

Run Redpanda Connect using a FIPS-compliant version of rpk, the Redpanda command-line interface (CLI).

Redpanda Connect configuration service

A configuration block that you can use to send logs and status events to a topic on a Redpanda cluster.

Secrets management

Retrieve secrets values from a remote system, such as a secret management solution, without setting environment variables.

Get an enterprise license

You can either upgrade to an Enterprise Edition license, or generate a trial license key that’s valid for 30 days.

Apply a license key to Redpanda Connect

When you have downloaded the license key, you can apply it using either the CLI (rpk) or Helm on Kubernetes.

rpk (local or VM)
Helm (Kubernetes)

If you have a license key file, either:

Save the license key to /etc/redpanda/redpanda.license.
Set the environment variable REDPANDA_LICENSE_FILEPATH to point to the file where the license key is stored.

If you have a license string, either:

Set the environment variable REDPANDA_LICENSE to the value of the full license string.
Run the following command using the full license string:

rpk connect run --redpanda-license <license-string> ./<connect-configuration>.yaml

Replace the following placeholders:

<license-string>: The full license key string.
<connect-configuration>: The name of your Redpanda Connect configuration file.

To enable enterprise features, you must provide a license key as a Kubernetes Secret and reference it in your deployment configuration.

Create the Secret:

kubectl create secret generic redpanda-connect-license \
  --from-literal=REDPANDA_LICENSE=<your-license-key> \
  --namespace <namespace>

Reference the license secret in your values.yaml or as a Helm value:
```
envFrom:
  - secretRef:
      name: redpanda-connect-license
```

This configuration mounts the license key as the REDPANDA_LICENSE environment variable, allowing Redpanda Connect to use enterprise features.

Verify a license

Redpanda Connect checks the license key status at runtime. If the license key is unavailable or has expired, you are blocked from using enterprise connectors.

You can view the license key’s expiration date at any time in the Redpanda Connect logs:

INFO Running main config from specified file       @service=benthos benthos_version=4.50.0 path=connect_2.yaml
INFO Successfully loaded Redpanda license          @service=benthos expires_at="2025-04-18T15:41:56+01:00" license_org=67XXX license_type="enterprise"