Like diskless, but smarter
Redpanda Cloud Topics: Object storage efficiency at high throughput
Completing the Redpanda One (R1) vision. Deploy the industry’s first adaptable streaming engine and use Cloud Topics to intelligently balance performance, safety, and efficiency—all within a single Redpanda Streaming cluster.
Not just another topic in the cloud
Redpanda Cloud Topics is a specialized streaming mode that provides the economics of direct-to-object-storage writes, without the risks of fully diskless systems.
Why not go "full diskless"?
Niche diskless vendors separate message content and metadata, eliminating brokers and using object storage to cut costs. This stateless approach forces a tradeoff, breaking Raft-backed safety guarantees. External metadata services add operational risk as a single point of failure.
The advantage: Write pass-through
Redpanda Cloud Topics use a pass-through write model. Heavy message payloads are streamed directly to object storage, but the brains of the operation—metadata and Raft consensus—remain on high-performance local disks. You get the economics of S3 with the reliability of a stateful broker.
R1: One engine, multiple modes
The arrival of Cloud Topics in Redpanda Streaming 26.1 completes the R1 architecture. R1 is a multi-modal engine that allows you to set the storage profile of your data at the topic level—eliminating niche clusters and disparate tools.
- Write Caching: For ultra-low latency and "speed boost" performance.
- Tiered Storage: Straddling the cost-speed tradeoff across local disk and S3.
- Iceberg Topics: Zero-ETL materialization into Apache Iceberg™-based lakehouses.
- Cloud Topics: Diskless-like efficiency for massive-scale telemetry and archival.
Eliminate the cross-AZ tax
Traditional high-availability Kafka architectures require paying your cloud provider for every byte replicated between availability zones (AZs). Because Cloud Topics pass messages through to object storage, you bypass this replication tax.
90% lower networking costs
Eliminate inter-node replication fees in multi-AZ deployments.
Infinite retention
Scale to petabytes without the disk limitations. Query instantly via the Kafka API.
Infrastructure consolidation
Stop managing niche clusters for logs or analytics. Run it all on one adaptable engine.
Why Raft-backed durability matters
Niche diskless vendors sacrifice Kafka's core reliability to save on costs. Redpanda Cloud Topics keep the "brains" of your data local, while supporting diskless-like cost efficiency.
Predictable performance
By keeping Raft consensus and partition metadata on local NVMe, we eliminate the metadata lag that causes tail-latency spikes in stateless systems. Get predictable read-your-writes performance and latency-tolerant cold reads.
Zero-compromise safety
Most diskless systems break Raft consensus and degrade Kafka guarantees. Redpanda maintains strict message ordering and "exactly-once" semantics—even on cost-efficient Cloud Topics.
No external dependencies
We don’t outsource your data’s truth to external metadata systems. Your offsets, ACLs, and schemas are managed by the same battle-hardened engine that powers your mission-critical apps.
Architectural flexibility
Cloud Topics coexist with standard Redpanda topics and Tiered Storage configurations. Set them easily on a per-topic basis. You'll never have to choose between cluster-wide cost and performance settings again.
FAQ: Redpanda Cloud Topics
While both operate in a cloud environment, "Cloud Topics" refers specifically to a specialized storage class within the Redpanda One (R1) architecture rather than a simple service location. Standard topics replicate the entire message across local NVMe disks in multiple availability zones to prioritize performance and high availability. In contrast, Cloud Topics use a write pass-through model where heavy message payloads are streamed directly to object storage (S3/GCS) while only lightweight metadata remains on local disk to ensure consistency.
The primary difference lies in the write path and the timing of data movement to the cloud. Tiered Storage is an offload mechanism where data is first written to local disks for maximum speed & safety, and then moved to object storage automatically as it ages. Cloud Topics are "storage-first" from the first byte, using a write pass-through model to persist message payloads directly to the cloud. This allows users to bypass the initial "replication tax" of a high availability architecture—the expensive cross-AZ networking fees—for high-volume, latency-tolerant data.
Redpanda intentionally avoids fully diskless designs because moving critical metadata and consensus logic (Raft) to an external service creates dependencies and limitations that could break core Kafka features. Cloud Topics keep the "brains" of the partition on local NVMe disks. This hybrid design delivers the 90% cost savings of a diskless system, while maintaining the battle-hardened reliability, strict message ordering, and sub-10-millisecond metadata performance of a stateful broker.
Yes. Because Cloud Topics maintain the Raft-based metadata layer on local disk, they inherit the same enterprise-grade consistency logic as standard Redpanda topics. This allows Cloud Topics to fully support exactly-once semantics, transactions, and idempotent producers.
One of the defining features of the Redpanda One (R1) engine is its multi-modal nature, which allows different storage classes to coexist seamlessly within a single cluster. This eliminates the need to manage a "zoo" of niche clusters for different workload requirements. You can run low-latency operational apps on standard topics, alongside high-volume telemetry or AI context on Cloud Topics—all managed under a single security model, the same Kafka API, and on one Redpanda cluster.
Cloud Topics is an enterprise feature available on Redpanda Self-Managed, Redpanda BYOC, and Redpanda Dedicated starting with version 26.1. It is specifically designed and recommended for multi-AZ architectures, where it provides the maximum ROI by eliminating cross-AZ networking fees on high-throughput data. Cloud Topics is not currently available on Redpanda Serverless, as that environment is currently single-AZ and does not yet support the multi-zone networking optimizations that Cloud Topics was built to solve.
No. Tiered Storage is enabled and managed by default for all Redpanda Cloud clusters, so no manual configuration is required there. However, to use Cloud Topics, you must explicitly select the "Cloud" storage mode by setting the redpanda.storage.mode=cloud property when creating a new topic. While standard topics use Tiered Storage as a background process to archive older data, Cloud Topics require this opt-in at creation because they use a specialized "storage-first" path that writes message payload data directly to object storage from the very first byte. You don't need to manage any new infrastructure, but you do need to choose the Cloud Topic mode to trigger the 90% networking cost savings.
One engine. No compromises.
Explore Redpanda Cloud Topics and experience the power of R1, the first adaptable streaming engine.