# How to turn on Tiered Storage for your Kafka topic

This guide shows you how to enable tiered storage for your Kafka topic.

## Prerequisites

You need to own an existing topic in nais.
Check [Create a Kafka topic](/persistence/kafka/how-to/create.md) for how to create a topic.

Your topic can not use `compact` cleanup policy.

## Enable tiered storage by specifying local retention on a topic

> **Git diff showing how to enable tiered storage in a 'nai example_topic.yaml' file**
> ```diff
> diff --git a/example_topic.yaml b/example_topic.yaml
> index 230ec001..cbc01774 100644
> --- a/example_topic.yaml
> +++ b/example_topic.yaml
> @@ -8,3 +8,8 @@ labels:
>  spec:
>  kafka:
>    # ... other configuration ...
> +  config:
> +    # Must be a value smaller than `retentionHours`
> +    localRetentionHours: X
> +    # Must be a value smaller than `retentionBytes`
> +    localRetentionBytes: Y
> ```

## Apply the new configuration

**Automatically**

Add the file to your application repository and deploy with [Nais github action](/build/how-to/build-and-deploy.md).

**Manually**

```bash
kubectl apply -f ./example_topic.yaml --namespace=<MY-TEAM> --context=<MY-ENV>
```