The latest release of Redpanda Cloud adds enterprise security features and expands on performance with additional high-throughput tiers — with up to 1.2 GBps ingress — while still delivering lower TCO for customers like ShareChat.

Additionally, we're upgrading our uptime SLA to 99.95% (or "three nines five" availability) and expanding support for Protocol Buffers.

Now, onto the updates!

AWS PrivateLink for Redpanda Dedicated and BYOC clusters

There are several ways to connect VPCs and networks in AWS. PrivateLink is one of the most secure. It abstracts low-level controls like network ACLs and security groups and treats the connection as its own private AWS service via VPC endpoints.

For Redpanda Dedicated clusters and Redpanda BYOC deployments, we're simplifying the process for regulated organizations, many requiring PrivateLink to meet specific compliance requirements. Both Dedicated and BYOC options continue to support VPC peering as an alternative way to make the connection. Redpanda also supports access to AWS PrivateLink over VPC peering connections.

Audit logging for simplified compliance

Recently introduced in the 23.3 release of Redpanda's core engine, the audit logging feature is now available to Redpanda Cloud customers, for both Dedicated and BYOC deployments!

We designed auditing to be simple to use and flexible to integrate into security and compliance workflows. Redpanda audit logs capture interactions from the Kafka API, Redpanda Admin API, and the rpk CLI. Auditing also captures all API calls to the Schema Registry. (Consult our docs to enable audit logging.) Redpanda audit messages follow the Open Cybersecurity Schema standard to promote compatibility with existing SIEM and monitoring tools like Splunk, Sumo Logic, and Amazon Security Lake.

High-throughput tiers 6 and 7 for BYOC clusters

We have expanded the performance and cost-efficiency benefits that we introduced in November. Now, Redpanda BYOC customers can take advantage of tiers 6 and 7, with higher maximum ingress and egress speeds and larger partition limits of up to 50,000. GCP users can use x86/Intel-based instances, while AWS users can choose between ARM/Graviton and x86/Intel-based instances.

These high-throughput tiers are already delivering value for customers. ShareChat, India's leading social media platform, detailed how moving from Google Cloud Pub/Sub to Redpanda BYOC reduced the company's "cloud infrastructure spend on event streaming by about 70%, resulting in savings of millions of USD annually."

As a GCP customer, ShareChat could lift & shift from Pub/Sub to Redpanda's high-throughput tier 6.

“We are now scaling up new use cases on our event streaming architecture without worrying about spiraling infrastructure costs.” - ShareChat blog.

Aside from price-performance value, Redpanda's Kafka-compatible API unlocks the wider open-source ecosystem for ShareChat, providing better integration with Apache Flink®. Among other highlights, Redpanda's BYOC deployment model also helps to future-proof the social media platform's streaming architecture from changing data sovereignty and compliance requirements.

99.95% availability

As Redpanda has grown and expanded our roster of enterprise customers, we're also working behind the scenes to expand the high-availability characteristics of Redpanda Cloud. We're happy to announce that we are updating our Cloud SLA to support 99.95% uptime. Be on the lookout for more news here, as we work toward "four nines'' availability!

Protobuf converter sink in private beta

Sink connectors across Redpanda Cloud's range of managed connectors can now handle the serialization and deserialization of data in the Protocol Buffer format.

Popular among performance-minded developers, "Protobuf'' is the data interchange format from Google. It's now an open standard for exchanging structured data, thanks to its efficient application of schemas and wide cross-language support. Protobuf support in Redpanda Cloud managed connectors is in beta and complements existing data conversion functionality for JSON, Avro, and other formats.

Redpanda Cloud API private beta

The ability to programmatically create, read, update, and delete Redpanda Cloud resources is coming soon to a cluster near you! Now in beta, the Cloud API enables customers to write infrastructure automation code for managing clusters, users, topics, connectors, and more — greatly simplifying management tasks.

The beta release adds flexibility to your workflows as well, laying the foundation for a Redpanda Cloud Terraform provider. Please reach out to the Redpanda customer success team to request access to the beta.

Redpanda Cloud: flexible, powerful, connected

That’s the latest for Redpanda Cloud, but we’re not slowing down. Expect regular updates as we continue to build the most flexible, powerful, and connected streaming data cloud platform.

To get started, sign up for a free trial of Redpanda Cloud or grab the free Community Edition from our Redpanda GitHub repo. If you have questions about the latest updates or want to chat with our team, join our Redpanda Community on Slack.