What’s New in Redpanda Cloud

Redpanda now supports virtual network (VNet) peering for Dedicated clusters on Azure.

For BYOC clusters, Redpanda added support for the following regions:

Redpanda Connect is now available on Dedicated clusters. This is a limited availability (LA) release. Secret management is also available on BYOC, Dedicated, and Serverless clusters so that you can add secrets to your pipelines without exposing them.

For a Redpanda cluster deployed across multiple availability zones (AZs), leader pinning ensures that a topic’s partition leaders are geographically closer to clients. Leader pinning can lower networking costs and help guarantee lower latency by routing produce and consume requests to brokers located in certain AZs.

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 on AWS, previously known as customer-managed VPC.

With standard BYOC clusters, Redpanda manages security policies and resources for your virtual network (VNet), including subnetworks, managed identities, IAM roles, security groups, and storage accounts. For the highest level of security, you can manage these resources yourself with a customer-managed VNet on Azure. Because Azure functionality is provided in limited availability, to unlock this feature, contact Redpanda support.

You can contact Redpanda sales to request a private offer for monthly or annual committed use through the Azure Marketplace. You can then quickly provision Dedicated clusters in Redpanda Cloud, and you can view your bills and manage your subscription directly in Azure Marketplace.

Redpanda now supports compute-optimized tiers with AWS Graviton3 processors. This saves over 50% in instance costs in all BYOC tiers.

The Redpanda Terraform provider lets you create and manage resources in Redpanda Cloud, such as clusters, topics, users, ACLs, networks, and resource groups.

Redpanda Cloud now offers greater flexibility to schedule upgrades to your cluster. By default, Redpanda Cloud may run maintenance operations on any day at any time. You can override this default and schedule a maintenance window, which requires Redpanda Cloud to run operations on your specified day and time.

Redpanda Connect is now integrated into Redpanda Cloud and available as a fully-managed service. This is a limited availability (LA) release for BYOC and a beta release for Serverless. Choose from a range of connectors, processors, and other components to quickly build and deploy streaming data pipelines or AI applications from the Cloud UI or using the Data Plane API. Comprehensive metrics, monitoring, and per pipeline scaling are also available. To start using Redpanda Connect, try this quickstart.

For more detailed information about recent component updates, see What’s New in Redpanda Connect.

Redpanda now supports Dedicated clusters on Azure. This is a limited availability (LA) release for Dedicated clusters.

The beta release of remote read replicas has been extended to support customer-managed VPC deployments.

The Redpanda Docs site has been redesigned for an easier experience navigating Redpanda Cloud docs. We hope that our docs help and inspire our users. Please share your feedback with the links at the bottom of any doc page.

Redpanda now supports BYOC clusters on Azure. This is a limited availability (LA) release for BYOC clusters.

To start using Dedicated, sign up on the AWS Marketplace. New subscriptions receive $300 (USD) in free credits to spend in the first 30 days. AWS Marketplace charges for anything beyond $300, unless you cancel the subscription. After your credits have been used, you can continue using your cluster without any commitment, only paying for what you consume.

For BYOC clusters and Dedicated clusters, Redpanda added support for the following regions:

You can now create remote read replica topics on a BYOC cluster with the Cloud API. A remote read replica topic is a read-only topic that mirrors a topic on a different cluster. It can serve any consumer, without increasing the load on the source cluster.

Redpanda has increased the number of client connections in all tiers. For example, tier 1 now supports up to 9,000 maximum connections, and tier 9 supports up to 450,000 maximum connections. Connections are regulated per broker for best performance.

The Cloud API allows you to programmatically manage clusters and resources in your Redpanda Cloud organization. For more information, see the Cloud API Quickstart, the Cloud API Overview, and the full Cloud API reference.

mTLS authentication is now available for Kafka API clients. You can enable mTLS for your cluster using the Cloud API.

You can now manage GCP Private Service Connect and AWS PrivateLink connections to your BYOC or Dedicated cluster on the Cluster settings page in Redpanda Cloud. See the steps for PrivateLink and Private Service Connect.

Redpanda now provides single message transforms (SMTs) to help you modify data as it passes through a connector, without needing additional stream processors.

Redpanda Cloud has a simplified navigation, with clusters and networks available at the top level. It now has a global view of all resources in your organization. Namespaces are now called resource groups, although the functionality remains the same.

When you create a BYOC or Dedicated cluster, you select a cloud tier with the expected usage for your cluster, including the maximum ingress, egress, partitions (pre-replication), and connections. Redpanda has added tiers 8 and 9 for BYOC clusters, which provide higher supported configurations.

Redpanda Serverless moved out of beta and into limited availability (LA). This means that it has usage limits and no public SLA. During LA, existing clusters can scale to the usage limits, but new clusters may need to wait for availability. Serverless is the fastest and easiest way to start data streaming. It is a production-ready deployment option with automatically-scaling clusters available instantly. To start using Serverless, sign up for a free trial. This is no base cost, and with pay-as-you-go billing after the trial, you only pay for what you consume.

Redpanda Cloud now supports OpenID Connect (OIDC) integration, so administrators can leverage existing identity providers for user authentication to your Redpanda organization with single sign-on (SSO). Redpanda uses OIDC to delegate the authentication process to an external IdP, such as Okta. To enable this for your account, contact Redpanda support.

AWS PrivateLink is now available as an easy and highly secure way to connect to Redpanda Cloud from your VPC. You can set up the PrivateLink endpoint service for a new cluster or an existing cluster. To enable AWS PrivateLink for your account, contact Redpanda support.

When you create a cluster, you select a cloud tier with the expected throughput for your cluster, including the maximum ingress, egress, partitions, and connections. On February 5, Redpanda added tiers 6 and 7 for BYOC clusters, which provide higher throughput limits.

Redpanda Cloud now supports usage-based billing for Dedicated clusters. Contact Redpanda sales to request a private offer for monthly or annual committed use. You can then use existing Google Cloud Marketplace or AWS Marketplace credits to quickly provision Dedicated Cloud clusters, and you can view your bills and manage your subscription directly in the marketplace.

Redpanda Serverless is a managed streaming service (Kafka API) that completely abstracts users from scaling and operational concerns, and you only pay for what you consume. It’s the fastest and easiest way to start event streaming in the cloud. You can try the beta release of Redpanda Serverless with a free trial.

BYOC clusters on AWS now support ARM-based Graviton2 instances. This lowers VM costs and supports increased partition count.

With the managed connector for Apache Iceberg, you can write data into Iceberg tables. This enables integration with the data lake ecosystem and efficient data management for complex analytics.

In the Redpanda Console UI, you can perform Schema Registry operations, such as registering a schema, creating a new version of it, and configuring compatibility. The Schema Registry page lists verified schemas, including their serialization format and versions. Select an individual schema to see which topics it applies to.

With maintenance windows, you have greater flexibility to plan upgrades to your cluster. By default, Redpanda Cloud upgrades take place on Tuesdays. Optionally, on the Cluster settings page, you can select a window of specific off-hours for your business for Redpanda to apply updates. All times are in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). Updates may start at any time during that window.