Dedicated

After you log in to Redpanda Cloud, you land on the Clusters page. This page lists all the clusters in your organization.

Create a Dedicated cluster

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

    Enter a cluster name, then select the resource group, cloud provider (AWS, GCP, or Azure), region, tier, availability, and Redpanda version.

    • If you plan to create a private network in your own VPC, select the region where your VPC is located.

    • Three availability zones provide two backups in case one availability zone goes down.

  2. Click Next.

  3. On the Network page, enter the connection type: public or private. For private networks:

    • Your network name is used to identify this network.

    • For a CIDR range, choose one that does not overlap with your existing VPCs or your Redpanda network.

      Private networks require either a VPC peering connection or a private connectivity service, such as AWS PrivateLink, GCP Private Service Connect, or Azure Private Link.

    • Clusters with private networking include a setting for API Gateway network access. Public access exposes endpoints for Redpanda Console, the Data Plane API, and the MCP Server API, but they remain protected by your authentication and authorization controls. Private access restricts endpoint access to your VPC/VNet only.

      On Azure, private access incurs an additional cost, since it involves deploying two network load balancers, instead of one.

      After the cluster is created, you can change the API Gateway access on the cluster settings page. If you change from public to private access, users without VPN access to the Redpanda VPC will lose access to these services.

  4. Click Create.

    After the cluster is created, you can select the cluster on the Clusters page to see the overview for it.

Start streaming: example

Use rpk, Redpanda’s CLI, to build a basic streaming application that creates a topic, produces messages to it, and consumes messages from it. To learn about rpk, see the Introduction to rpk.

  1. Login to Redpanda Cloud, and select your resource group using the interactive prompt.

    rpk cloud login

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

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

  3. Go to the Security page, 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. 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