Redpanda Serverless now Generally Available

Redpanda Serverless on AWS is now Generally Available (GA), bringing enterprise-grade security with support for AWS PrivateLink, and production-ready observability to a fully managed, consumption-based platform that elastically scales for your Apache Kafka®-compatible data streaming workloads.

Best of all, it introduces a unique hybrid networking model: you can simultaneously enable PrivateLink for secure production traffic, and a public endpoint for external data and developer access—on the exact same cluster.

The Serverless journey

When we first introduced Redpanda Serverless it was with the aim to bring zero-ops simplicity to builders everywhere. In our next iteration, we increased limits and added built-in elastic scaling to allow customers to scale their workloads and support bursty workloads.

Since then, Redpanda Serverless has enabled thousands to become builders. Now they can focus on building their applications instead of managing data streaming infrastructure.

Consumer mobile applications

For one of our builders this meant building a social media app at scale to handle user engagement flows, connecting to Supabase as their data source. The serverless model lets them scale with user growth without predicting capacity needs or managing infrastructure.

Internet of Things

Another customer deployed Redpanda Serverless for their IoT data pipeline to provide intelligent heating control for heat pumps and maximize electricity savings.

Financial services and fintech

Running a 24/7 stock exchange, QFEX needed enterprise-grade reliability for its event streaming infrastructure. Every action on their platform—trades, orders, balance updates, position updates—flows through Redpanda Serverless.

“At QFEX, we are rebuilding the financial exchange stack from scratch to operate 24/7. That requires infrastructure that is operationally sound but practically invisible. We initially self-hosted our data streaming tools, but quickly realized that debugging disk usage and rebalancing partitions was stealing cycles from building our core trading engine.

Redpanda Serverless gave us our velocity back. It allows us to satisfy governance requirements with AWS PrivateLink networking, while keeping the critical 'exactly-once' guarantees we need for financial transactions—without the risk of managing the streaming stack ourselves. It’s the difference between building and operating a platform, and just relying on a fully-managed service.”

— Joshua Wharton, Founder & CTO, QFEX

Breaking down the barriers to production 

The data streaming landscape has long been divided into two camps: affordable but limited or feature-complete but expensive enterprise platforms. Builders were forced to choose between cost and capabilities.

Redpanda Serverless collapses that false choice. Enterprise-grade security features like PrivateLink aren't locked behind expensive tiers that will require upgrades or long-term contracts. They're available on a flexible, consumption-based platform that starts at zero. You get the private networking that your CISO requires without the dedicated cluster that your CFO questions.

Similarly, production-grade observability isn't a premium add-on. It's built into the platform through standard protocols that work with tools you already use. You maintain your existing Prometheus and Grafana stack, gaining full visibility into your streaming infrastructure without having to learn proprietary monitoring solutions.

This GA release removes the final barrier for enterprise customers. With AWS PrivateLink support and a standard Prometheus metrics endpoint, Redpanda Serverless now delivers the security and observability that production workloads demand, while maintaining the serverless promise of zero infrastructure management.

Private networking that doesn't lock you in

For builders subject to strict security policies, AWS PrivateLink changes everything. Your sensitive data never traverses the public internet. Redpanda appears as a native endpoint inside your VPC, with no public endpoints and no open ports accessible from outside. This satisfies the most stringent InfoSec and compliance requirements for network isolation.

But here's what makes this different from other platforms: you're not locked into a single networking choice. Redpanda Serverless supports hybrid connectivity, allowing simultaneous public and private access on the same cluster. 

Developers can prototype locally using the public endpoint while production applications connect securely via PrivateLink. No VPNs, no bastion hosts, no friction. When you're ready to tighten security, just toggle private-only mode with a single click.

This flexibility matters because teams move at different speeds. Your data engineers can enable PrivateLink today for production workloads while developers continue to iterate rapidly on new features. You can even maintain that secure public endpoint for production ingestion from internet-facing sources, like IoT sensors or public data feeds. You can even maintain that secure public endpoint for production ingestion from internet-facing sources, like IoT sensors or public data feeds. The platform adapts to your workflow, not the other way around.

Private networking in action

Want to see how easy it is to bridge public and private networking in Redpanda Serverless? Check out this demo from our Streamfest 2025 conference. We walk through the complete setup of AWS PrivateLink on a Serverless cluster, showing you how to maintain public access for your devs while locking down production traffic.

For a full workload estimate, check out our pricing calculator. While base cluster pricing varies by region, the rates for Serverless PrivateLink support are standard across all seven of our AWS regions:

• Ingress: $0.02/GB
• Egress: $0.02/GB
• Endpoint uptime: $0.05/hr

Learn how to configure PrivateLink for Redpanda Serverless, with  step-by-step instructions in our docs

Full visibility into your streaming data

"Black box" managed services create anxiety. When consumer lag spikes or costs increase unexpectedly, you need answers, not guesswork. That's why Redpanda Serverless now exposes a dedicated Prometheus metrics endpoint that integrates instantly with your existing observability stack.

Redpanda exports metrics through a standard /public_metrics endpoint that Prometheus can scrape directly. Simply add your Serverless cluster endpoint to your Prometheus scrape configuration to immediately gain visibility into critical operational metrics. 

Track throughput at the topic and partition level, monitor consumer group lag to catch processing bottlenecks before they impact your application, observe read and write rates to understand usage patterns, and correlate all of this with your monthly bill to understand exactly where your costs are coming from.

If you're already using Grafana for visualization, the integration is plug-and-play. Your Redpanda metrics appear alongside your application metrics in your existing dashboards. No proprietary monitoring tools to learn, no separate vendor consoles to check, no context switching between systems.

Whether you're using pre-built Grafana dashboards from Redpanda's observability repository or building custom views with PromQL queries, you have complete flexibility to visualize your data the way that makes sense for your team.

This visibility transforms how you operate. When a consumer falls behind, you can instantly identify it in your existing alerting system and investigate the cause with the same tools you use for the rest of your infrastructure. When your usage increases, you can see exactly which topics and applications are driving it, enabling data-driven decisions about optimization. 

When you're troubleshooting performance issues, you have the metrics you need to understand whether the bottleneck is in your application code, your consumer configuration, or your data pipeline architecture. Production confidence comes from understanding, and now you have the data you need to understand your streaming infrastructure as deeply as you understand the rest of your stack.

For customers who prefer to use the Redapanda Console for observability, in-console metrics are coming soon!

Learn more about metrics monitoring in our docs or see the API reference for /public_metrics

Build any Kafka use case, from prototype to production

With these foundational capabilities in place, Redpanda Serverless becomes a platform for any streaming data use case. Event-driven microservices, real-time analytics pipelines, change data capture, IoT telemetry processing, audit logging, activity tracking—if you can build it with Kafka, you can build it with Redpanda Serverless.

The beauty is in the scaling model. Start with a single topic and a handful of messages per day. As your application grows, Redpanda Serverless grows with it, automatically scaling throughput and storage without any cluster sizing decisions or capacity planning. You pay only for what you use. There's no long-term commitment, no reserved capacity to purchase or wasted resources sitting idle.

This economic model fundamentally changes how you approach building. You can experiment freely, spinning up topics for new ideas without worrying about ballooning cloud costs. You can deploy side projects to production without justifying thousands in monthly infrastructure spend. You can scale from zero to enterprise-grade throughput on the same platform, without migrations or architectural changes.

Stop compromising. Start streaming

You don’t have to choose between the agility of serverless and the security of enterprise networking. Experience the platform that gives you both!

• Start a free trial of Redpanda Serverless (No credit card required.)
• Need to verify the specs first? Read our guide to configuring AWS PrivateLink.
• Prefer to use your AWS committed spend? Subscribe via AWS Marketplace.