Deploy for Production
You can deploy Redpanda for production with a default deployment, which uses recommended deployment tools, or with a custom deployment, which uses unsupported deployment tools.
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Prerequisites
Make sure you meet the hardware and software requirements.
Select deployment type
To start deploying Redpanda for production, choose your deployment type:
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Default deployment: Use recommended deployment tools.
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Custom deployment: Use unsupported deployment tools.
Default deployment
This section describes how to set up a production cluster of Redpanda.
Install Redpanda
Install Redpanda on each system you want to be part of your cluster. There are binaries available for Fedora/RedHat or Debian systems.
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Fedora/RedHat
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Debian/Ubuntu
curl -1sLf 'https://dl.redpanda.com/nzc4ZYQK3WRGd9sy/redpanda/cfg/setup/bash.rpm.sh' | \
sudo -E bash && sudo yum install redpanda -y
curl -1sLf 'https://dl.redpanda.com/nzc4ZYQK3WRGd9sy/redpanda/cfg/setup/bash.deb.sh' | \
sudo -E bash && sudo apt install redpanda -y
Install Redpanda Console
Redpanda Console is a developer-friendly web UI for managing and debugging your Redpanda cluster and your applications.
For each new release, Redpanda compiles the Redpanda Console to a single binary for Linux, macOS, and Windows. You can find the binaries in the attachments of each release on GitHub.
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Fedora/RedHat
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Debian/Ubuntu
curl -1sLf 'https://dl.redpanda.com/nzc4ZYQK3WRGd9sy/redpanda/cfg/setup/bash.rpm.sh' | \
sudo -E bash && sudo yum install redpanda-console -y
curl -1sLf 'https://dl.redpanda.com/nzc4ZYQK3WRGd9sy/redpanda/cfg/setup/bash.deb.sh' | \
sudo -E bash && sudo apt-get install redpanda-console -y
Set Redpanda to production mode
By default, Redpanda is installed in development mode, which turns off hardware optimization.
To enable hardware optimization, set Redpanda to run in production mode:
sudo rpk redpanda mode production
To tune the hardware, run the autotuner on each node:
sudo rpk redpanda tune all
To run
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For more details, see the autotuner reference.
Optional: Benchmark your SSD
On taller machines, Redpanda recommends benchmarking your SSD. This can be done with rpk iotune. You only need to run this once. For reference, a local NVMe SSD should yield around 1 GB/s sustained writes.
If you’re on AWS, GCP, or Azure, creating a new instance and upgrading to an image with a recent Linux kernel version is often the easiest way to work around bad devices.
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Start Redpanda
Configure Redpanda using the rpk redpanda config bootstrap
command, then start Redpanda:
sudo rpk redpanda config bootstrap --self <ip-address-of-your-node> --ips <seed-server-ips> && \
sudo rpk redpanda config set redpanda.empty_seed_starts_cluster false && \
sudo systemctl start redpanda-tuner redpanda
Replace the following placeholders:
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<ip-address-of-your-node>
: The--self
flag tells Redpanda the interface address to bind to for the Kafka API, the RPC API, and the Admin API. Usually, this is the node’s private IP address. -
<seed-server-ips>
: The--ips
flag lists all the seed servers in the cluster, including the one being started. Seed servers correspond to theseed_servers
property inredpanda.yaml
.The --ips
flag must be set identically (with nodes listed in identical order) on each node.
When a Redpanda cluster starts, it instantiates a controller Raft group with all the seed servers specified in the --ips
flag. After all seed servers complete their startup procedure and become accessible, the cluster is then available. After that, non-seed servers start up and are added to the cluster.
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Start Redpanda Console
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Start Redpanda Console:
sudo systemctl start redpanda-console
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Make sure that Redpanda Console is active and running:
sudo systemctl status redpanda-console
Verify the installation
To verify that the Redpanda cluster is up and running, use rpk
to get information about the cluster:
rpk cluster info
If topics were initially created in a test environment with a replication factor of 1
, use rpk topic alter-config
to change the topic replication factor:
rpk topic alter-config [TOPICS...] --set replication.factor=3
To create a topic:
rpk topic create panda
Custom deployment
This section provides information for creating your own automation for deploying Redpanda clusters without using any of the tools that Redpanda supports for setting up a cluster, such as Ansible Playbook, Helm Chart, or Kubernetes Operator.
Redpanda strongly recommends using one of these supported deployment tools. See Automate Deploying for Production. |
Configure bootstrapping
Redpanda cluster configuration is written with the Admin API and
the rpk cluster config
CLIs.
In the special case where you want to provide configuration to Redpanda
before it starts for the first time, you can write a .bootstrap.yaml
file
in the same directory as redpanda.yaml
.
This file is only read on the first startup of the cluster. Any subsequent
changes to .bootstrap.yaml
are ignored, so changes to
cluster configuration must be done with the Admin API.
The content format is a YAML dictionary of cluster configuration properties. For example, to initialize a cluster with Admin API authentication enabled
and a single superuser, the .bootstrap.yaml
file would contain the following:
admin_api_require_auth: true
superusers:
- alice
With this configuration, the Admin API is not accessible until you bootstrap a user account.
Bootstrap a user account
When using username/password authentication, it’s helpful to be able to create one user before the cluster starts for the first time.
Do this by setting the RP_BOOTSTRAP_USER
environment variable
when starting Redpanda for the first time. The value has the format
<username>:<password>
. For example, you could set RP_BOOTSTRAP_USER
to alice:letmein
.
RP_BOOTSTRAP_USER only creates a user account. You must still
set up authentication using cluster configuration.
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Secure the Admin API
The Admin API is used to create SASL user accounts and ACLs, so it’s important to think about how you secure it when creating a cluster.
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No authentication, but listening only on 127.0.0.1: This may be appropriate if your Redpanda processes are running in an environment where only administrators can access the host.
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mTLS authentication: You can generate client and server x509 certificates before starting Redpanda for the first time, refer to them in
redpanda.yaml
, and use the client certificate when accessing the Admin API. -
Username/password authentication: Use the combination of
admin_api_require_auth
,superusers
, andRP_BOOTSTRAP_USER
to access the Admin API username/password authentication. You probably still want to enable TLS on the Admin API endpoint to protect credentials in flight.
Configure the seed servers
Seed servers help new brokers join a cluster by directing requests from newly-started brokers to an existing cluster. The seed_servers broker configuration property controls how Redpanda finds its peers when initially forming a cluster. It is dependent on the empty_seed_starts_cluster broker configuration property.
Starting with Redpanda version 22.3, you should explicitly set empty_seed_starts_cluster
to false
on every broker, and every broker in the cluster should have the same value set for seed_servers
. With this set of configurations, Redpanda clusters form with these guidelines:
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When a broker starts and it is a seed server (its address is in the
seed_servers
list), it waits for all other seed servers to start up, and it forms a cluster with all seed servers as members. -
When a broker starts and it is not a seed server, it sends requests to the seed servers to join the cluster.
It is essential that all seed servers have identical values for the seed_servers
list. Redpanda strongly recommends at least three seed servers when forming a cluster. Each seed server decreases the likelihood of unintentionally forming a split brain cluster. To ensure brokers can always discover the cluster, at least one seed server should be available at all times.
By default, for backward compatibility, empty_seed_starts_cluster
is set to true
, and Redpanda clusters form with the guidelines used prior to version 22.3:
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When a broker starts with an empty
seed_servers
list, it creates a single broker cluster with itself as the only member. -
When a broker starts with a non-empty
seed_servers
list, it sends requests to the brokers in that list to join the cluster.
You should never have more than one broker with an empty seed_servers
list, which would result in the creation of multiple clusters.
Redpanda expects its storage to be persistent, and it’s an error
to erase a broker’s drive and restart it. However, in some environments (like when migrating to a different Node pool on Kubernetes), truly persistent storage is unavailable,
and brokers may find their data volumes erased. For such environments, Redpanda recommends setting empty_seed_starts_cluster to false and designating a set of seed servers such that they couldn’t lose their storage simultaneously.
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Configure broker IDs
Redpanda automatically generates unique IDs for each new broker. This means that you don’t need to include IDs in configuration files or worry about policies on node_id
re-use.
If you choose to assign broker IDs, make sure to use a fresh node_id
each time you add a broker to the cluster.
Never reuse broker IDs, even for brokers that have been decommissioned and restarted empty. Doing so can result in an inconsistent state. |
Upgrade considerations
Deployment automation should place each broker into maintenance mode and wait for it to drain leadership before restarting it with a newer version of Redpanda. For more information, see Upgrade.
If upgrading multiple feature release versions of Redpanda in succession, make sure to verify that each version upgrades to completion before proceeding to the next version. You can verify by reading the /v1/features
Admin API endpoint and checking that cluster_version
has increased.
Starting with Redpanda version 23.1, the /v1/features
endpoint also includes a node_latest_version
attribute, and installers can verify that the cluster has activated any new functionality from a previous upgrade by checking for cluster_version
== node_latest_version
.
Next steps
If clients connect from a different subnet, see Configure Listeners.