Serverless

Serverless is the fastest and easiest way to start data streaming. A cluster is available instantly, there is no base cost, and you only pay for what you consume. For information about all Redpanda Cloud cluster types, see Redpanda Cloud Overview.

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.

Prerequisites

  1. Sign up for a trial of Redpanda Serverless.

  2. Make sure you have the latest version of rpk. See Install or Update rpk.

Limits

Each Serverless cluster has the following limits:

  • Ingress: up to 10 MBps, 0.5 MBps guaranteed

  • Egress: up to 30 MBps, 1.5 MBps guaranteed

  • Partitions: 100 partitions

  • Message size: 20 MB

  • Retention: unlimited time

  • Storage: unlimited

  • Users: 30

  • ACLs: 120

  • Consumer groups: 200

  • These baseline limits are subject to change. To increase your limits, contact support.

  • Partition counts do not include partition replicas.

Get started with Serverless 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. 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. You can view detailed billing activity for each cluster and edit payment methods on the Billing page. Each trial supports five Serverless clusters.

When either the 100 credits expire or the 14 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 7 day grace period following the end of the trial. After that, the data is permanently deleted.

Explore your trial cluster

After you click to 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. The hello-world topic starts as a free read-only topic. It is materialized and becomes billable with your credits if you produce messages to it.

Follow the steps in the UI to use rpk to interact with your cluster from the command line:

  1. Log in:

    rpk cloud login

  2. Consume from the hello-world topic:

    rpk topic consume hello-world

In the Redpanda Cloud UI, you can navigate to the Topics page and open the hello-world topic to see the included messages. Under the Actions dropdown, you can produce messages to it. Add team members and grant them access with ACLs on the Security page.

Connect with your cluster

Create a Kafka client to interact with your cluster. The Overview page lists your bootstrap server URL and security settings in the How to connect - Kafka API tab.

Or, Redpanda can generate a sample application to interact with your cluster. Run rpk generate app, and select your preferred programming language. Follow the commands in the terminal to run the application, create a demo topic, produce to the topic, and consume the data back.

Here are some helpful rpk commands:

  • rpk cloud login: Use this to log in to Redpanda Cloud or to refresh the session.

  • rpk topic: Use this to manage topics, produce data, and consume data.

  • rpk profile print: Use this to view your rpk configuration and see the URL for your Serverless cluster.

  • rpk security user: Use this to manage users and permissions.

Redpanda Serverless 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. Create topics on the Topics page or with rpk topic create.

Create a new Serverless cluster

To create additional Serverless clusters:

  1. In Redpanda Cloud UI, on the Clusters page, click Create cluster, then click Create Serverless cluster.

  2. Enter a cluster name, then select the resource group. If you don’t have an existing resource group, you can create one. Refresh the page to see newly-created resource groups.

    Serverless clusters are currently available in certain AWS regions. Redpanda expects your applications to be deployed in the same AWS region. For best performance, select the region closest to your applications. Serverless is not guaranteed to be pinned to a particular availability zone within that region.

Supported features

  • Redpanda Serverless supports the Kafka API.

  • Serverless clusters work with all Kafka clients. For more information, see Kafka Compatibility.

  • Serverless clusters support all major Apache Kafka messages for managing topics, producing/consuming data (including transactions), managing groups, managing offsets, and managing ACLs. (User management is available in the Redpanda Cloud UI or with rpk security acl.)

Unsupported features

  • Kafka Connect managed connectors

  • Data transforms

  • Redpanda Admin API

  • HTTP Proxy API

Next steps