We have long described the developer as the hero of the Redpanda story, and today we’re putting them front and center with the Limited Availability release of Redpanda Serverless! Our new product delivers the Apache Kafka® API as a managed service that’s instantly available, greatly simplifying the developer experience.

Redpanda Serverless enables anyone to start up a streaming data service in seconds to build new applications. There’s no infrastructure to manage, unexpected costs, or long-term commitments. Simplicity is the name of the game, so you can start fast and stay flexible with:

• Instant cluster creation

• Automatic scale-to-zero compute

• Usage-based pricing

We believe that streaming data should adapt to your development requirements, not the other way around. With Redpanda Serverless, you can start small and iterate, and gracefully absorb spiky and sporadic workloads too. So you can stay focused on what you do best — code that delights users with new real-time experiences or pipelines that inform analysts with the freshest data — and create new event-driven applications.

Want to learn more about our serverless offering directly from our team? Sign up for our Serverless Launch Stream online event on March 26th! In the meantime, here’s what you need to know about our exciting new service.

The Redpanda ecosystem

In addition to introducing a fully managed SaaS product to complement Redpanda Cloud's BYOC and Dedicated options, Serverless accelerates opportunities to build with innovative companies across the streaming data ecosystem. The ability to instantly create and delete serverless Repanda clusters makes it fast and cost-efficient to explore new use cases and integrations.

Redpanda works with leading companies in event-driven application design, stream processing, databases, and real-time analytics like the following:

• Event-driven application design: Aklivity, AWS Lambda, Bytewax, Conduktor, Meroxa, Prisma, and Quix.

• Stream processing and analytics engines: Arroyo, Decodable, DeltaStream, MongoDB Atlas Stream Processing, Timeplus, and Ververica.

• Databases and real-time analytics: ClickHouse, Feldera, Materialize, MongoDB, Neon, QuestDB, RisingWave, SingleStore, TiDB, and Tinybird.

A brief tour of Redpanda Serverless

The best way to experience Redpanda Serverless is with a free trial. No credit card required. Here's a short video that shows how to instantly create a serverless cluster and start working with data in seconds.

Serverless clusters scale automatically, without forcing you to think about new brokers and rebalancing partitions. Whenever you’re ready to expand your use of Redpanda beyond our Serverless tier, you can easily upgrade to support your higher throughput and data sovereignty requirements.

Within Redpanda Console, you'll see quickstart instructions for the Redpanda CLI tool (rpk), as well as code examples for Redpanda-validated Kafka client libraries for Go (franz-go), Python (kafka-python), and Node.js (KafkaJS).

While most users will interact with the service programmatically, the console for Redpanda Serverless allows you to interact with topics via the UI for quick prototyping and testing.

Redpanda Serverless comes with $100 to spend during a 14-day trial period. To continue using Serverless beyond your trial, just enter a credit card and you’re ready to go.

See our documentation on Redpanda Serverless, including information on usage metrics, supported features, and more.

Early feedback from the ecosystem

We designed Redpanda Serverless with our ecosystem partners in mind, and here’s what they're saying about it:

Managing data streaming systems is notoriously challenging. The arrival of Redpanda Serverless is exciting because it will help many new teams embrace streaming. We’re thrilled about our integration with Redpanda’s latest offering, as developers will now be able to launch real-time apps and services across the stack faster than ever before!

—Leonid Lukyanov, CEO & Founder, Aklivity

At Bytewax, our mission is to make streaming processing faster and easier for everyone, regardless of their level of expertise in stream processing. As new use cases emerge in the real-time ML and AI area, we recognize that many developers, especially those with a background in these fields, prefer not to deal with the complexities of infrastructure management. That's where Redpanda truly shines. It enables Python developers to easily tap into the power of streaming data without the overhead. The launch of Redpanda Serverless takes this a step further, unlocking even more opportunities for rapid development and deployment.

—Oli Makhasoeva, Director of DevRel and Operations, Bytewax

Serverless is the future of data infrastructure, and DeltaStream has been a pioneer in providing a serverless stream processing platform. With the availability of Redpanda Serverless and its seamless integration with DeltaStream's serverless platform, you can now build streaming applications without having to go through the challenge of infrastructure provisioning.

—Hojjat Jafarpour, Founder of DeltaStream

"Combining Redpanda Serverless with Materalize’s operational data warehouse makes it easier to build streaming applications than ever before. With the Apache Kafka API available as a managed service, our customers can now ingest streaming data into Materialize as well as sink data from Materialize effortlessly to activate their real-time operational workloads."

—Jessica Laughlin, Head of Product, Materialize

The seamless integration of Redpanda Serverless and Meroxa's Conduit Platform offers developers an unparalleled, efficient solution for real-time data streaming and processing, enabling businesses to effortlessly scale and innovate.

—DeVaris Brown, CEO & Co-Founder, Meroxa

Integrating Redpanda with QuestDB aligns our strengths in extracting peak performance from modern hardware, free of unnecessary dependencies. This partnership enhances our time-series data processing capabilities, ensuring efficient and high-performance real-time data management for our users.

—Nicolas Hourcard, Co-Founder & CEO at QuestDB

Often serving as the source and destination in the data pipeline architecture, we are excited to see the general availability of Redpanda’s serverless offering. Both TiDB Serverless and Redpanda Serverless make it easy for developers to achieve scalability, reliability, and performance when managing their data infrastructure — at a fraction of the operational cost of traditional ETL.

—Eddie Xu, Director of Alliances, TiDB

Our customers love using Redpanda with Timeplus. The combo is a super way for developers to build and scale powerful streaming applications, even with limited resources. The new serverless delivery model will make it even easier for data teams to deploy instantly as their requirements change.

—Jove Zhong, Co-Founder, Timeplus

Tinybird's mission is to give developers tools they love to quickly build real-time analytics at scale, without having to worry about managing infrastructure. Together with Redpanda's new serverless platform and our native Redpanda Connector, it couldn't be easier for developers and data teams to build fresh data products over streaming data.

—Jorge Sancha, CEO and Co-Founder of Tinybird

What will you build?

With Redpanda Serverless, we're putting you, the developer, in the driver's seat. We can't wait to see what you build with it!

To get started, sign up for a free trial of Redpanda Serverless or grab our free Community Edition from our Redpanda GitHub repo. If you have questions about pricing and functionality, check out our product page or ask our team directly by joining the Redpanda Community on Slack.