Create a BYOC Cluster on GCP

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.

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 GCP.

Create a BYOC cluster

On the Clusters page, click Create cluster, then click Create BYOC cluster.

Enter a cluster name, then select the resource group, provider (GCP), 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 labels. After the cluster is created, the labels are applied to all GCP resources associated with this cluster. For more information, see the GCP 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.

Note that rpk configures the permissions required by the agent to provision and actively maintain the cluster. For details about these permissions, see GCP IAM permissions.

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.