Redpanda Cloud Quickstart

The fastest and easiest way to start data streaming is with a Serverless cluster free trial. Redpanda instantly prepares an account for you that includes a welcome cluster with a hello-world demo topic you can explore. You interact with Serverless clusters the same way you’d interact with Dedicated or BYOC clusters. To learn more, see Serverless.

The following steps describe how to spin up a Dedicated cluster with Redpanda Cloud, create a basic streaming application using the rpk command-line tool, and explore your cluster in Redpanda Console.

Prerequisites

Sign up for a trial of Redpanda Cloud - Dedicated Clusters.

Deploy Redpanda

To create a Dedicated Cloud cluster, log in to Redpanda Cloud.

  1. On the Clusters page, click Create cluster, then click Create Dedicated cluster.

  2. For cluster settings, enter redpandaquickstart for the cluster name. Use default values for the remaining properties, and click Next.

  3. On the Networking page, use the default Public connection type, and click Create.

    Wait for your network and your cluster to be created.

Start streaming

To start building a basic streaming application, you can use rpk, Redpanda’s CLI, to create a topic, produce messages to it, and consume messages from it.

  1. Install rpk on your local machine:

    The rpk binary is not supported on Windows.

    • Linux

    • macOS

    1. Download the rpk archive for Linux.

      • To download the latest version of rpk:

        curl -LO https://github.com/redpanda-data/redpanda/releases/latest/download/rpk-linux-amd64.zip

      • To download a version other than the latest:

        curl -LO https://github.com/redpanda-data/redpanda/releases/download/v<version>/rpk-linux-amd64.zip

    2. Ensure that you have the folder ~/.local/bin:

      mkdir -p ~/.local/bin

    3. Add it to your $PATH:

      export PATH="~/.local/bin:$PATH"

    4. Unzip the rpk files to your ~/.local/bin/ directory:

      unzip rpk-linux-amd64.zip -d ~/.local/bin/

    5. Run rpk --version to display the version of the rpk binary:

      rpk --version
      rpk version 24.3.2 (rev e01198e)

    1. If you don’t have Homebrew installed, install it.

    2. Install rpk:

      brew install redpanda-data/tap/redpanda

    3. Run rpk --version to display the version of the rpk binary:

      rpk --version
      rpk version 24.3.2 (rev e01198e)
      This method installs the latest version of rpk, which is supported only with the latest version of Redpanda.

  2. On the Overview page of Redpanda Cloud, copy your bootstrap server address and set it as an environment variable on your local machine:

    export RPK_BROKERS="<bootstrap-server-address>"

  3. In Redpanda Cloud, go to Security and create a user called redpanda-chat-account that uses the SCRAM-SHA-256 mechanism.

  4. Copy the password, and set the following environment variables on your local machine:

    export REDPANDA_SASL_USERNAME="redpanda-chat-account"
export REDPANDA_SASL_PASSWORD="<password>"
export REDPANDA_SASL_MECHANISM="SCRAM-SHA-256"

  5. In Redpanda Cloud, click the name of your user and add the following permissions to the ACL (access control list):

    • Host: *

    • Topic name: chat-room

    • Operations: All

  6. Click Create.

  7. Use rpk on your local machine to authenticate to Redpanda as the redpanda-chat-account user and get information about the cluster:

    rpk cluster info -X tls.enabled=true

  8. Create a topic called chat-room.

    You granted permissions to the redpanda-chat-account user to access only this topic.

    rpk topic create chat-room -X tls.enabled=true

    Output:

    TOPIC       STATUS
chat-room  OK

  9. Produce a message to the topic:

    rpk topic produce chat-room -X tls.enabled=true

  10. Enter a message, then press Enter:

    Pandas are fabulous!

    Example output:

    Produced to partition 0 at offset 0 with timestamp 1663282629789.

  11. Press Ctrl+C to finish producing messages to the topic.

  12. Consume one message from the topic:

    rpk topic consume chat-room --num 1 -X tls.enabled=true

    Your message is displayed along with its metadata:

    {
  "topic": "chat-room",
  "value": "Pandas are fabulous!",
  "timestamp": 1663282629789,
  "partition": 0,
  "offset": 0
}

Explore your topic

In Redpanda Cloud, go to Topics > chat-room.

The message that you produced to the topic is displayed along with some other details about the topic.

Clean up

If you don’t want to continue experimenting with your cluster, you can delete it.

Go to Cluster settings and click Delete cluster.

Next steps

Suggested reading

Learn more about rpk and explore the rpk commands that you used in this quickstart: