Redpanda: Quickstart to selfhost Redpanda

⏰ Estimated Time: 4 minutes

This guide covers the steps to self-host Redpanda on your Kubernetes cluster using Argonaut.

Redpanda is a distributed event streaming platform providing infrastructure for real-time data. It is designed to be fast, scalable, and easy to use. It is built on top of Apache Kafka and is fully compatible with the Kafka ecosystem while being packaged as a single binary without the need for ZooKeeper or a separate control plane.

This makes for a lightweight and easily maintainable deployment. It provides a number of features that make it well-suited for modern streaming applications, including support for transactions and a high-performance storage engine.

We will deploy both Redpanda and the Redpanda console.

Prerequisites for installation

Argonaut account with an environment created
AWS or GCP account connected to Argonaut
EKS or GKE cluster provisioned by Argonaut or any other imported Kubernetes cluster

Note: This installation requires Kubernetes 1.21+. Argonaut automatically maintains Kubernetes versions.

Setup Library App in Argonaut

You can add Redpanda as a custom app from Library to Argonaut. This will then be available in your cluster under Add-Ons.

💡 Each Redpanda broker runs on its own worker node and requires a minimum of 3 nodes. This can be changed in Helm chart configuration's podAntiAffinity rules by setting podAntiAffinity.type: soft.

Click on the Application + and the From Library button.
Choose Custom-Apps under configuration.
Ensure the selected environment is correct, then select the cluster you want to deploy the agent to. Important to ensure that the environment and region of this node are the same as all other nodes.
Set the configuration to Custom Apps (Helm)
1. Set the namespace as the same name as the cluster (that's where your apps are deployed by default)
2. Release Name as redpanda
3. Chart Name as redpanda
4. Repo Url as https://charts.redpanda.com
The Helm version will be updated automatically.

Make the following changes to values.yaml file.

 # Logging
 logging:
   # Log level
   # Valid values (from least to most logging) are warn, info, debug, trace
   logLevel: warn

Notes:
1. Multiple redpanda instances running in the same cluster will need manual port tweaks to avoid conflicts. This is supported by the chart.
2. Secrets must be used for passwords in production environments.
3. Optionally, enable SASL authentication by editing this in the values.yaml file.
```
 # Authentication
 auth:
   sasl:
     enabled: true
     users:
       - name: superuser
         password: <secretpassword>
```
Click on Install to deploy the app.

Accessing Redpanda

The Kafka interface is exposed on port 9094 by default (listeners.kafka.external.default.port). The Redpanda console is exposed on port 9644 within the cluster (listeners.admin.port).

Components installed

The Redpanda Helm chart will install the following components into your Kubernetes cluster:

A StatefulSet with three Pods.
One PersistentVolumeClaim for each Pod, each with a capacity of 20Gi.
A headless ClusterIP Service and a NodePort Service for each Kubernetes node that runs a Redpanda broker.

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