What’s New in the Redpanda Operator

The Redpanda Operator introduces the NodePool custom resource, which lets you manage groups of Redpanda brokers as independent units within a single cluster. Each NodePool creates its own StatefulSet, giving you fine-grained control over broker placement, resources, and lifecycle.

NodePools enable blue/green node pool migrations: you create a new NodePool on the target Kubernetes node pool, and the operator automatically replicates data and decommissions old brokers with zero downtime. This replaces the manual, broker-by-broker migration process.

The Console custom resource supports a monitoring configuration that deploys a Prometheus ServiceMonitor to automatically discover and scrape Console metrics. See Prometheus ServiceMonitor.

The Redpanda custom resource supports configuring Schema Registry ACLs through the schemaRegistry.authenticationMethod field. This enables fine-grained access control for Schema Registry operations in clusters deployed with Kubernetes.

When you enable Schema Registry authentication, you can control which users and service accounts can register, modify, and read schemas. See Configure Authentication for Redpanda in Kubernetes for configuration details.

The Redpanda custom resource supports Cloud Topics in Kubernetes deployments. You can configure topics to use cloud storage as the primary backing store by setting the appropriate storage mode properties.

Cloud Topics in Kubernetes provide the same cost savings and architectural benefits as self-managed deployments. You configure them declaratively through the Redpanda custom resource. For setup instructions, see Cloud Topics for Kubernetes.

The Redpanda Operator supports group-based access control (GBAC) for Kubernetes deployments with OIDC authentication. You can assign roles and ACLs to OIDC groups, and users automatically inherit permissions from their group memberships.

GBAC simplifies permission management in Kubernetes environments by integrating with your identity provider’s group structure. See Group-based access control for Kubernetes for configuration and usage details.