Redpanda validates a range of client libraries from the Kafka ecosystem, including libraries for Node.js, Python, Go, and more. Clients that have not been validated by Redpanda Data — but use the Kafka protocol — remain compatible with Redpanda Serverless, subject to certain limitations. Redpanda Serverless also provides in-console quickstart guides featuring franz-go, kafka-python, and KafkaJS.

New signups will get $100 in free credits, which expire in 14 days. To continue using Serverless Standard after the 14-day free trial period, users must enter a valid credit card within 7 days of trial expiration. Accounts remain active in perpetuity, but after this 7-day period, Redpanda will delete any data in an account that has not successfully registered a credit card.

Serverless Standard features usage-based pricing, billing users at the end of the month. We provide usage examples of small and large workloads in the pricing calculator above, but to summarize, we price usage on the following dimensions:

• Per GB in (write) 0.1 USD
• Per GB out (read) 0.1 USD
• Per GB retained 0.1 USD
• Per partition/hr 0.003 USD (no charge for replicas)

Redpanda Serverless is subject to various usage limits during the LA release, including the following:

Serverless Standard

• Ingress throughput: 1 MBps
• Egress throughput: 3 MBps
• Partitions: 100 max

Serverless Pro

• Ingress throughput: 10 MBps
• Egress throughput: 30 MBps
• Partitions 500 max

We built a new cloud-native serverless tier to deliver proper workload isolation while handling massive Kafka workloads (5, 10, 20GB/s). By virtualizing the entire TCP connection and session management, we’ve designed an architecture that supports the most successful Kafka API implementation outside of Apache Kafka itself. See the architecture summary below.

We have been working on a full-on protocol virtualization layer for multiple years, so that it would require exactly zero changes to applications. Internally, Redpanda Serverless is a multi-tier architecture in the cloud — adaptable to any cloud, any region upon demand.

In addition to broker-local, topic-aware, cluster balanced throttling mechanics, we needed a global fleet to adjust rates dynamically on a flat hierarchy of streams so we could absorb traffic spikes without needing to scale the fleet of backend cells. Redpanda Serverless’ mechanics enables the technology to do live TCP migration between cells within the Kafka-Metadata timeout duration allowing Redpanda to do live migration of terabytes of data in an instant. See the mechanics of whole-cluster restore for background information.

Redpanda Cloud has a 99.99% uptime SLA on our BYOC and Dedicated tiers. For Serverless Standard and Serverless Pro, we currently offer a 99.5% uptime SLA; expect industry standard SLAs upon General Availability.

Yes, it truly scales to zero. If you do not use Serverless Standard, we do not charge you, period. In fact the initial bytes in the read-only “hello-world” topic don't even go against your free trial funds!

The Redpanda Serverless LA is a production-ready, scale-to-zero Kafka API and includes support for Schema Registry and for Redpanda Connect. Serverless clusters also support all major Apache Kafka messages for managing topics, producing/consuming data (including transactions), managing groups, managing offsets, and managing ACLs. See our docs for a full list of supported features.

For additional functionality, please integrate with one of our launch partners for a best-of-breed streaming experience.

We call this Read Replicas and have had this capability for over 2 years. The ability to read directly from S3 without incurring intercluster transfer costs is available today in our Dedicated and BYOC tiers. See more on our docs.

Today, we provide 200+ data connectors as part of Redpanda Connect for Serverless. Redpanda Connect is currently in LA for BYOC and Dedicated clusters. Please reach out if you’d like to upgrade.

Serverless Standard and Serverless Pro are currently available on AWS in the us-east-1 (Virginia) and eu-central-1 (Frankfurt) regions. Ask for a region via #serverless in the community Slack team.