Docs Cloud Get Started Introduction to Redpanda Cloud Redpanda Cloud Overview Redpanda Cloud is a complete data streaming platform delivered as a fully-managed service with automated upgrades and patching, data and partition balancing, and 24x7 support. It continuously monitors and maintains your clusters along with the underlying infrastructure to meet strict performance, availability, reliability, and security requirements. All Redpanda Cloud clusters are deployed with an integrated Redpanda Console. For more detailed information about the Redpanda platform, see Introduction to Redpanda and How Redpanda Works. Redpanda Cloud cluster types Redpanda offers three types of fully-managed cloud clusters: Serverless: Clusters hosted in Redpanda Cloud. This is the fastest and easiest way to start data streaming. Dedicated Cloud: Single-tenant clusters hosted in Redpanda Cloud. This provides more control over your deployment. Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC): Clusters hosted in your private cloud. This provides more control over your deployment and offers full data sovereignty. With standard BYOC clusters, Redpanda manages security policies and resources for your VPC or VNet, including subnetworks, IAM roles, and storage buckets/accounts. A Bring Your Own Virtual Private Cloud (BYOVPC) cluster allows you to deploy the Redpanda data plane into your existing VPC/VNet and take full control of managing the networking lifecycle. Compared to a standard BYOC setup, this option provides more security. Serverless 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. There is no base cost, and with pay-as-you-go billing after the free trial, you only pay for what you consume. You can view detailed billing activity for each cluster and edit payment methods on the Billing page. Sign up for Serverless To start using Serverless, sign up for a free trial. New trials receive $100 (USD) in free credits to spend in the first 14 days. This should be enough to run Redpanda with reasonable throughput. No credit card is required for a trial. To continue using your Serverless cluster after the free trial, add a credit card and pay as you go. You can also subscribe to Redpanda Cloud through AWS Marketplace to quickly provision Serverless clusters. New subscriptions 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. Serverless is currently in a limited availability (LA) release with usage limits. During LA, existing clusters can scale to the usage limits, but new clusters may need to wait for availability. Dedicated Cloud With Dedicated clusters, you host your data on Redpanda cloud resources (AWS, GCP, or Azure), and Redpanda handles provisioning, operations, and maintenance. Dedicated clusters are single-tenant deployments that support private networking (for example, VPC peering to talk over private IPs) for better data isolation. When you create a Dedicated cluster, you select the supported tier that meets your compute and storage needs. Sign up for Dedicated Subscribe to Redpanda Cloud on the AWS Marketplace to quickly provision Dedicated clusters. New subscriptions 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. Alternatively, you can contact Redpanda sales to request a private offer for monthly or annual committed use. With a usage-based billing commitment, you sign up for a monthly or an annual minimum spend amount through AWS Marketplace, Azure Marketplace, or Google Cloud Marketplace. You can then provision Dedicated clusters in Redpanda Cloud, and you can view invoices and manage your subscription in the marketplace. Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) With BYOC clusters, you deploy Redpanda in your own cloud (AWS, GCP, or Azure), and all data is contained in your own environment. This provides an additional layer of security and isolation. When you create a BYOC cluster, you select the supported tier that meets your compute and storage needs. Redpanda handles provisioning, operations, and maintenance. See also: BYOC architecture. Sign up for BYOC To start using BYOC, contact Redpanda sales to request a private offer. You are billed directly or through Google Cloud Marketplace or AWS Marketplace. Serverless vs Dedicated/BYOC Serverless clusters are a good fit for the following use cases: Starter and growing workloads Spiky workloads (that is, development environments, systems that only occasionally get busy, or workloads that come and go) Fast and dynamic cluster creation: you can use a Serverless cluster as an isolated container for topics With Serverless (and for Dedicated when procured through the AWS Marketplace), you only pay for what you consume, without any commitment. A cluster is created instantly, so you can surface it in your applications (for example, for tenant isolation). If your workload increases, you can migrate it to a Dedicated or BYOC cluster. Consider Dedicated or BYOC if you need more control over the deployment or if you have workloads with consistently-high throughput. Dedicated and BYOC clusters offer the following features: Private networking Single-zone or multi-zone availability. A multi-zone cluster provides higher resiliency in the event of a failure in one of the zones. Ability to export metrics to a 3rd-party monitoring system Kafka connectors Higher limits and quotas. See Dedicated usage tiers and BYOC usage tiers compared to Serverless limits. Shared responsibility model The Redpanda Cloud shared responsibility model lists the security ownership areas for Redpanda and customers. Responsibilities depend on the type of deployment. Dedicated BYOC BYOVPC 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 ✓ 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 ✓ (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 ✓ Maintenance windows Redpanda runs maintenance and upgrade operations on clusters in a rolling fashion, accompanied by a series of health checks, so there is no disruption to the availability of your service. As part of the Kafka protocol, recycling nodes cause client connections to be restarted. All mainstream client libraries support automatic reconnections for this. By default, Redpanda Cloud may run maintenance operations on any day at any time. You can override this default and schedule a specific maintenance window on the Cluster settings page. A Scheduled maintenance window requires Redpanda Cloud to run operations on the day and time specified. Maintenance windows typically take six hours. All operations begin during the maintenance window, but some operations may complete after the window ends. All times are in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). Redpanda Cloud maintenance cycles always start on Tuesdays. Clusters scheduled on Tuesdays are updated first, and clusters scheduled on Mondays are updated last. Keep this in mind when sequencing updates for multiple clusters. 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 high availability, Redpanda Cloud uses a control plane and data plane architecture. Control plane: This is where most cluster management, operations, and maintenance takes place. The control plane enforces rules in the data plane. Data plane: This is where your cluster lives. The term data plane is used interchangeably with cluster. Agent: Redpanda uses an agent to manage the data plane from the control plane. Clusters are configured and maintained in the control plane, but they remain available even if the network connection to the control plane is lost. In the user interface, when you’re at the organization (org) level or the resource group level, but you haven’t yet selected a cluster, you’re in the control plane. This is where you can select, create, and delete clusters, resource groups, and networks. When you’re at the cluster level working with topics, consumer groups, and connectors, you’re in the data plane. BYOC architecture The following diagram shows a BYOC architecture, where you deploy the data plane in your own VPC. All network connections into the data plane take place through either a public endpoint or a VPC peering network connection. Sensitive data and credentials never leave the data plane. Redpanda Cloud does not support user access to the control plane with kubectl. This restriction allows Redpanda Data to manage all configuration changes internally to ensure a 99.99% service level agreement (SLA) for BYOC clusters. A BYOC cluster is initially set up from the control plane. This is a two-step process performed by rpk cloud byoc apply: You bootstrap a virtual machine (VM) in your VPC. This VM spins up the agent and the required infrastructure. Redpanda assigns the necessary IAM policies required to run the agent and configures workload identity. That is, it configures independent IAM roles for each workload, with only the permissions each workload requires. The agent communicates with the control plane to pull the cluster specifications. After the agent is up and running, it connects to the control plane and starts dequeuing and applying cluster specifications that provision, configure, and maintain clusters. The agent is in constant communication with the control plane, receiving and applying cluster specifications and exchanging cluster metadata. Agents are authenticated and authorized through opaque and ephemeral tokens, and they have dedicated job queues in the control plane. Agents also manage VPC peering networks. To create a Redpanda cluster in your virtual private cloud (VPC), follow the instructions in the Redpanda Cloud UI. The UI contains the parameters necessary to successfully run rpk cloud byoc apply with your cloud provider. 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 create topics in Redpanda Cloud on the Topics page or with rpk topic create.) 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 Self-Managed deployments: Integration with Apache Iceberg. For private beta access on BYOC, contact Redpanda Support. Data transforms. For private beta access, contact Redpanda Support. Remote Read Replicas. This is in beta for Redpanda Cloud. Kafka API OIDC authentication. However, Redpanda Cloud does support SSO to the Redpanda Cloud UI. Admin API. FIPS-compliance mode. Kerberos authentication. Redpanda debug bundles. Redpanda Console topic documentation. Configuring access to object storage with customer-managed encryption key. Kubernetes Helm chart and Redpanda Operator functionality. The following rpk commands: rpk cluster config rpk cluster health rpk cluster license rpk cluster maintenance rpk cluster partitions rpk cluster self-test rpk cluster storage rpk connect rpk container rpk debug rpk iotune rpk redpanda rpk topic describe-storage (All other rpk topic commands are supported on both Redpanda Cloud and Self Managed.) rpk transform (This is in beta for Redpanda Cloud.) rpk generate app (This is supported in Serverless clusters only.) rpk security user (This is supported in Serverless clusters only.) The rpk cloud commands are not supported in Self-Managed deployments. Next steps Create a Serverless Cluster Create a Dedicated Cloud Cluster Create a BYOC Cluster Suggested reading Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC): best of both worlds A middle path for data sovereignty: Bring Your Own Cloud Suggested videos YouTube - What is Redpanda BYOC? 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