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, How Redpanda Works, and BYOC Architecture.

Redpanda Cloud cluster types

Redpanda offers fully-managed cloud clusters for Serverless, BYOC, and Dedicated. All products have access to unlimited storage and 280+ data connectors with Redpanda Connect.

Serverless Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) Dedicated

For starter projects and applications with low or variable traffic.

For production clusters requiring data sovereignty, the highest throughput, and added security.

For production clusters requiring expert cloud hosting, higher throughput, and extra isolation.

Multi-tenant in Redpanda Cloud on AWS

In your cloud on AWS, Azure, or GCP

Single-tenant in Redpanda Cloud on AWS, Azure, or GCP

100 MB/s max write throughput

2 GB/s max write throughput

400 MB/s max write throughput

300 MB/s max read throughput

4 GB/s max read throughput

800 MB/s max read throughput

5000 partitions

112,500 partitions

45,600 partitions

99.9% SLA

99.99% SLA

99.99% SLA

Public networking

Public or private networking

Public or private networking

SSO (GitHub, Google), Kafka ACLs

SSO (GitHub, Google, OIDC), RBAC, audit logs

SSO (GitHub, Google, OIDC), RBAC, audit logs

Enterprise support with annual contracts

Enterprise support

Enterprise support

  • The partition limit is the number of logical partitions before replication occurs. Redpanda Cloud uses a replication factor of three.

  • Enterprise support is staffed by streaming experts around the clock Monday through Friday, plus immediate escalation for production outages 24/7.

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 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.

Serverless is currently in a limited availability (LA) release with usage limits.

Sign up for Serverless

  • Free trial

  • Redpanda Sales

  • AWS Marketplace

A free trial is the fastest way to get started with Serverless, and it comes with a welcome cluster. Each customer qualifies for a trial with $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. 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 UI or with the Kafka API. There is a seven-day grace period following the end of the trial. After that, the data is permanently deleted.

  • To ask questions about the trial, use the #serverless Community Slack channel.

  • For information about billing after the trial ends, see Usage Metrics.

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.

Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC)

With BYOC clusters, you deploy Redpanda in your own cloud (AWS, Azure, or GCP), and all data is contained in your own environment. This provides an additional layer of security and isolation. (See BYOC Architecture.) When you create a BYOC cluster, you select the supported tier that meets your compute and storage needs. Redpanda handles provisioning, operations, and maintenance.

With standard BYOC clusters, Redpanda manages security policies and resources for your VPC or VNet, including subnetworks, IAM roles, and storage buckets/accounts.

Bring Your Own Virtual Private Cloud (BYOVPC)

BYOVPC clusters allow you to deploy the Redpanda data plane into your existing VPC/VNet and take full control of managing the networking lifecycle. Compared to standard BYOC, BYOVPC provides more security, but the configuration is more complex. See Shared responsibility model.

The BYOC infrastructure that Redpanda manages should not be used to deploy any other workloads.

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.

Dedicated

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

  • Redpanda Sales

  • AWS 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. You can then provision Dedicated clusters in Redpanda Cloud, and you can view invoices and manage your subscription in the marketplace.

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.

Redpanda creates a cloud organization for you and sends you a welcome email.

Serverless vs BYOC/Dedicated

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 BYOC or Dedicated cluster.

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:

  • 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 Connect

  • 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 details about the control plane - data plane framework in BYOC, see BYOC architecture.

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.

  • BYOC

  • BYOVPC

  • 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 is integrated into Redpanda Cloud and available as a fully-managed service. Choose from a range of connectors, processors, and other components to quickly build and deploy streaming data pipelines or AI applications from the Cloud UI or using the Data Plane API. Comprehensive metrics, monitoring, and per pipeline scaling are also available. To start using Redpanda Connect, try this quickstart.

Kafka Connect is automatically enabled on AWS and GCP clusters. With this, there is a node running for Kafka Connect even if connectors are not used. To enable Kafka Connect on Azure clusters, see Enable Kafka Connect.

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:

  • Remote Read Replicas. This is in beta for Redpanda Cloud on AWS and GCP.

  • 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.)

      The rpk cloud commands are not supported in Self-Managed deployments.

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:

  • Redpanda Connect for Dedicated and BYOC (not BYOVPC on AWS or Azure)

  • Serverless

  • Dedicated and BYOC for Azure

  • BYOVPC for GCP

  • Azure Private Link

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:

  • Redpanda Connect for BYOVPC on GCP and Serverless

  • Redpanda Terraform provider

  • BYOVPC for AWS and Azure

  • Integration with Apache Iceberg

  • Remote Read Replicas for AWS and GCP