Create a BYOC Cluster on AWS

To create a Redpanda cluster in your virtual private cloud (VPC), follow the instructions in the Redpanda Cloud UI. The UI contains the parameters necessary to successfully run rpk cloud byoc apply. See also: Redpanda Cloud architecture.

With standard BYOC clusters, Redpanda manages security policies and resources for your VPC, including subnetworks, service accounts, IAM roles, firewall rules, and storage buckets. For the highest level of security, you can manage these resources yourself with a BYOVPC cluster on AWS.

Prerequisites

Before you deploy a BYOC cluster on AWS, check that the user creating the cluster has the following prerequisites:

A minimum version of Redpanda rpk v24.1. See Install or Update rpk.
The permissions necessary to launch infrastructure for running Redpanda. See IAM policies.
The AWS variables necessary to authenticate. Use either:
- AWS_PROFILE or
- AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
To verify access, you should be able to successfully run aws sts get-caller-identity for your region. See the AWS CLI reference.

Create a BYOC cluster

Log in to Redpanda Cloud.
On the Clusters page, click Create cluster, then click Create BYOC cluster.

Enter a cluster name, then select the resource group, provider (AWS), 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.

Optionally, click Advanced settings to specify up to five key-value custom tags. After the cluster is created, the tags are applied to all AWS resources associated with this cluster. For more information, see the AWS documentation.

Click Next.
On the Network page, enter the connection type: either Public or Private. For BYOC clusters, Private is best-practice.
- 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.
Click Next.
On the Deploy page, follow the steps to log in to Redpanda Cloud and deploy the agent.

As part of agent deployment, Redpanda assigns the permission required to run the agent. For details about these permissions, see AWS IAM policies.

Redpanda Cloud does not support user access to the control plane with kubectl. This restriction allows Redpanda Data to manage all configuration changes internally to ensure a 99.99% service level agreement (SLA) for BYOC clusters.