About the Local MCP server for Redpanda Cloud

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The local MCP server for Redpanda Cloud lets AI assistants securely access and operate your Redpanda Cloud account and clusters. MCP provides controlled access to:

  • Control Plane actions, such as creating a Redpanda Cloud cluster or listing clusters.

  • Data Plane actions, such as creating topics or listing topics.

By speaking natural language to your assistant, you can ask it to perform Redpanda operations on your behalf. The MCP server runs locally on your machine and authenticates to Redpanda Cloud using a Redpanda Cloud token.

A terminal window showing Claude Code invoking the local MCP server for Redpanda Cloud to list topics in a cluster.

What you can do

You can do anything that’s available in the Control Plane or Data Plane APIs. Typical requests you can make to your assistant once connected include:

  • Create a Redpanda Cloud cluster named dev-mcp.

  • List topics in dev-mcp.

  • Create a topic orders-raw with 6 partitions.

The MCP server does not expose delete endpoints by default. You can enable delete endpoints when you create the server if you intentionally want to allow delete operations.

Use cases

  • Test automation: Create short-lived clusters, create topics, and validate pipelines quickly.

  • Operational assistance: Inspect a cluster’s health or list topics during incidents.

  • Onboarding and demos: Let team members issue high-level requests without memorizing every CLI flag.

How it works

  1. Authenticate to Redpanda Cloud and receive a token using the rpk cloud login command.

  2. Configure your MCP client using the rpk cloud mcp install command. Your client then starts the server on-demand using rpk cloud mcp stdio, authenticating with the Redpanda Cloud token from rpk cloud login.

  3. Prompt your assistant to perform Redpanda operations. The local MCP server for Redpanda Cloud executes them in your Redpanda Cloud account using your Redpanda Cloud token.

Components

  • AI client (Claude, Claude Code, or any other MCP client) that connects to the MCP server.

  • Redpanda CLI (rpk) for obtaining a token and starting the local MCP server.

  • Redpanda Cloud account that the local MCP server can connect to and issue API requests.

Security considerations

MCP servers authenticate to Redpanda Cloud using your personal or service account credentials. However, there is no auditing or access control that distinguishes between actions performed by MCP servers versus direct API calls:

  • All API actions appear in Redpanda Cloud’s internal logs as coming from the authenticated user account, not the specific MCP server.

  • You cannot audit which MCP server performed which operations, as Redpanda Cloud logs are not accessible to users.

  • You cannot restrict specific MCP servers to only certain API endpoints or resources.

Next steps

Suggested reading

The Redpanda documentation site has a read-only MCP server that provides access to Redpanda docs and examples. This server has no access to your Redpanda Cloud account or clusters. See home:ROOT:mcp-setup.adoc.