Deploy and Host Redpanda on Railway

Redpanda is a Kafka-compatible streaming platform written in C++. It speaks the Kafka wire protocol, so existing Kafka clients, producers and consumers work unchanged, without ZooKeeper or a JVM. This template runs a single Redpanda v26.2.5 broker with a persistent volume, SASL/SCRAM authentication switched on from the first boot, and a public TCP endpoint for Kafka clients.

About Hosting Redpanda

This template runs the official redpandadata/redpanda image (pinned by digest). Data lives on a volume mounted at /var/lib/redpanda, so topics and messages survive redeploys. SASL is enabled at boot and an admin superuser is created with the generated REDPANDA_PASSWORD (SCRAM-SHA-256), so unauthenticated clients are rejected. The broker is capped to 2 cores and about 75% of the container's memory limit (--smp 2 --memory, read from the cgroup) so it does not size itself from the host. Two Kafka listeners are advertised: one on the private network (REDPANDA_PRIVATE_HOST:9092) for services in the same project, and one through the public TCP proxy (REDPANDA_PUBLIC_HOST:REDPANDA_PUBLIC_PORT). Topics are auto-created on first produce. Allow a minute on first boot before clients connect. Redpanda is licensed under the Business Source License (BSL); single-broker self-hosted use is permitted, see the upstream licence for limits.

Agent contract:

Kafka bootstrap (public): REDPANDA_PUBLIC_HOST:REDPANDA_PUBLIC_PORT (TCP proxy)
Kafka bootstrap (private network): REDPANDA_PRIVATE_HOST:9092
Security: SASL_PLAINTEXT, mechanism SCRAM-SHA-256
Username: admin
Password variable: REDPANDA_PASSWORD
No HTTP health path; check readiness by an authenticated rpk cluster info

RPK="docker run --rm -i --entrypoint rpk redpandadata/redpanda:v26.2.5 \
  -X user=admin -X pass=$REDPANDA_PASSWORD -X sasl.mechanism=SCRAM-SHA-256 \
  -X brokers=$REDPANDA_PUBLIC_HOST:$REDPANDA_PUBLIC_PORT"
$RPK cluster info
echo hello | $RPK topic produce demo
$RPK topic consume demo -n 1 --offset start

Why Deploy Redpanda on Railway?

Railway is a singular platform to deploy your infrastructure stack. Railway will host your infrastructure so you don't have to deal with configuration, while allowing you to vertically and horizontally scale it.

By deploying Redpanda on Railway, you are one step closer to supporting a complete full-stack application with minimal burden. Host your servers, databases, AI agents, and more on Railway.

Secure by default — unauthenticated Kafka clients are rejected; the password is generated per deploy.
Data survives redeploys — the volume is preconfigured and verified with a write, redeploy, read.
Zero configuration — no variables to fill in; the contract above is everything a client needs.
Kafka clients work — any Kafka library connects over the TCP endpoint with SASL/SCRAM.

Common Use Cases

Event streaming between services — decouple producers and consumers with durable topics.
Agent task queues and event logs — append-only history that agents can replay.
Kafka drop-in for development and small production — run existing clients against a single lightweight broker.

Dependencies for Redpanda Hosting

A volume mounted at /var/lib/redpanda (included in this template).

Deployment Dependencies

redpanda-data/redpanda — upstream server
redpandadata/redpanda on Docker Hub — the pinned image this template deploys