Add a Dedicated VPC Peering Connection

A VPC peering connection is a networking connection between two VPCs. This connection allows the VPCs to communicate with each other as if they were within the same network. A route table routes traffic between the two VPCs using private IPv4 addresses.

Traffic is not routed over the public internet.

When you select a network for deploying your Redpanda Dedicated cluster, you have the option to select a private connection with VPC peering. The VPC peering connection connects your VPC to the Redpanda Cloud VPC.

Prerequisites

  • VPC network: Before you set up a peering connection in the Redpanda Cloud UI, you must have a VPC in your own account for Redpanda’s VPC to connect to. If you do not already have a VPC, log in to the AWS VPC Console and create one.

  • Matching region: VPC peering connections can only be established between networks created in the same region. Redpanda Cloud does not support inter-region VPC peering connections.

  • Non-overlapping CIDR blocks: The CIDR block for your VPC network cannot match or overlap with the CIDR block for the Redpanda Cloud VPC.

Consider adding rp at the beginning of the VPC name to indicate that this VPC is for deploying a Redpanda cluster.

Create a peering connection

To create a peering connection between your VPC and Redpanda’s VPC:

  1. In the Redpanda Cloud UI, go to the Overview page for your cluster.

  2. In the Details section, click the name of the Redpanda network.

  3. On the Networks page, click VPC peering walkthrough.

  4. For Connection name, enter a name. For example, the name might refer to the VPC ID of the VPC you created in AWS.

  5. For AWS account number, enter the account number associated with the VPC you want to connect to.

  6. For AWS VPC ID, enter the VPC ID by copying it from the AWS VPC Console.

  7. Click Create peering connection.

Accept the peering connection request

Redpanda sends a peering request to the AWS VPC console. You must accept the request from the Redpanda VPC to set up the peering connection.

  1. Log in to the Amazon VPC console.

  2. Select the region where the VPC was created.

  3. From the navigation menu, select Peering Connections.

  4. Under Requester VPC, select the VPC you created for use with Redpanda.

    The status should say "Pending acceptance".

  5. Open the Actions menu and select Accept Request.

  6. In the confirmation dialog box, verify that the requester owner ID corresponds to the Redpanda account, and select Yes, Accept.

  7. In the next confirmation dialog box, select Modify my route tables now.

    Follow the steps in the dialog box to add routes to your route tables in the AWS console. This enables traffic to flow between the two VPCs.

VPC peering and PrivateLink use the same DNS hostnames (connection URLs) to connect to the Redpanda cluster. When you configure the PrivateLink DNS, those hostnames resolve to PrivateLink endpoints, which can interrupt existing VPC peering-based connections if clients aren’t ready.

To enable PrivateLink without disrupting VPC peering connections, do a controlled DNS switchover:

  1. Enable PrivateLink on the existing cluster and configure the PrivateLink connection to Redpanda Cloud, but do not modify VPC DNS attributes yet. See: Enable PrivateLink on an existing cluster.

  2. During a planned window, modify the VPC DNS attributes to switch the shared hostnames over to PrivateLink.