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Version: 23.1

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.

note

Prerequisites​

Hardware and software​

Follow these requirements and recommendations:

  • Operating system
    • Minimum required version of the Linux kernel: 3.10.0-514 or 4.18
    • Minimum version of RHEL/CentOS: 7.9
    • Minimum version of Ubuntu: 21.1
  • CPU and memory
    • A minimum of three physical nodes or virtual machines are required.
    • Two physical (not virtual) cores are required. Four physical cores are strongly recommended.
    • x86_64 (Westmere or newer) and AWS Graviton family processors are supported.
    • 2 GB or more of memory per core is required.
  • Storage
    • An XFS or ext4 file system for the data directory of Redpanda (/var/lib/redpanda/data) or the Tiered Storage cache. XFS is highly recommended. NFS is not supported.
    • Locally-attached NVMe devices. RAID-0 is required if you use multiple disks.
    • Ephemeral cloud instance storage is only recommended in combination with Tiered Storage or for Tiered Storage cache. Without Tiered Storage, attached persistent volumes (for example, EBS) are recommended.
  • Object storage providers for Tiered Storage
    • Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)
    • Google Cloud Storage (GCS), using the Google Cloud Platform S3 API
    • Azure Blob Storage (ABS)
  • Networking
    • Minimum 10 GigE
  • See Manage Disk Space for guidelines on cluster creation.

TCP/IP ports​

Redpanda uses the following default ports:

PortPurpose
9092Kafka API
8082HTTP Proxy
8081Schema Registry
9644Admin API and Prometheus
33145internal RPC

Select deployment type​

To start deploying Redpanda for production, choose your deployment type:

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.

curl -1sLf 'https://dl.redpanda.com/nzc4ZYQK3WRGd9sy/redpanda/cfg/setup/bash.rpm.sh' | \
sudo -E bash && sudo yum 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.

curl -1sLf 'https://dl.redpanda.com/nzc4ZYQK3WRGd9sy/redpanda/cfg/setup/bash.rpm.sh' | \
sudo -E bash && sudo yum 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
tip

To run rpk redpanda tune all on a Redpanda broker automatically after broker or host restarts, configure the service redpanda-tuner, which runs rpk redpanda tune all, to run at boot-up:

  • For RHEL, after installing the rpm package, run systemctl to both start and enable the redpanda-tuner service:

    sudo systemctl start redpanda-tuner
    sudo systemctl enable redpanda-tuner

  • For Ubuntu, after installing the apt package, run systemctl to start the redpanda-tuner service (which is already enabled):

    sudo systemctl start redpanda-tuner

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. rpk iotune captures SSD wear and tear and gives accurate measurements of what your hardware is capable of delivering. Run this before benchmarking.

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.

sudo rpk iotune # takes 10mins

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-node-ips> && \
sudo rpk redpanda config set redpanda.empty_seed_starts_cluster false && \
sudo systemctl start redpanda-tuner redpanda

Replace the following placeholders:

  • <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-node-ips>: The --ips flag lists all the seed nodes in the cluster, including the one being started. Seed nodes correspond to the seed_servers property in redpanda.yaml.

    note

    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 nodes that are specified in the --ips flag. After all seed nodes complete their startup procedure and become accessible, the cluster is then available. After that, non-seed nodes start up and are added to the cluster.

important
  • Redpanda strongly recommends at least three seed nodes when forming a cluster. A larger number of seed nodes increases the robustness of consensus and minimizes any chance that new clusters get spuriously formed after nodes are lost or restarted without any data.
  • It's important to have one or more seed nodes in each fault domain (such as rack or cloud AZ). A higher number provides a stronger guarantee that clusters don’t fracture unintentionally.
  • It's possible to change the seed nodes for a short period of time after a cluster has been created. For example, you may want to designate one additional broker as a seed node to increase availability. To do this without cluster downtime, add the new broker to seed_servers and restart Redpanda to apply the change on a broker-by-broker basis.

Start Redpanda Console​

  1. Start Redpanda Console:

    sudo systemctl start redpanda-console

  2. 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.

tip

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.

note

RP_BOOTSTRAP_USER only creates a user account. You must still set up authentication using cluster configuration.

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.

  • 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.
  • 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, and RP_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 nodes join a cluster by directing requests from newly-started nodes to an existing cluster. The seed_servers node configuration property controls how Redpanda finds its peers when initially forming a cluster. It is dependent on the empty_seed_starts_cluster node configuration property.

Starting with Redpanda version 22.3, you should explicitly set empty_seed_starts_cluster to false on every node, and every node in the cluster should have the same value set for seed_servers. With this set of configurations, Redpanda clusters form with these guidelines:

  • When a node 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 node 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 nodes when forming a cluster. Each seed server decreases the likelihood of unintentionally forming a split brain cluster. To ensure nodes can always discover the cluster, at least one seed node 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:

  • When a node starts with an empty seed_servers list, it creates a single node cluster with itself as the only member.
  • When a node starts with a non-empty seed_servers list, it sends requests to the nodes in that list to join the cluster.

You should never have more than one node with an empty seed_servers list, which would result in the creation of multiple clusters.

important

Redpanda expects its storage to be persistent, and it's an error to erase a node'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 nodes may find their data volumes erased. For such environments, Redpanda recommends setting empty_seed_starts_cluster to false and designating a set of seed nodes such that they couldn't lose their storage simultaneously.

Configure node IDs​

Redpanda automatically generates unique node IDs for each new node. This means that you don't need to include node IDs in configuration files or worry about policies on node_id re-use.

If you choose to assign node IDs, make sure to use a fresh node_id each time you add a node to the cluster.

caution

Never reuse node IDs, even for nodes that have been decommissioned and restarted empty. Doing so can result in an inconsistent state.

Upgrade considerations​

Deployment automation should place each node 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.

Suggested reading​

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