Karpenter and Why You Should Ditch Cluster Autoscaler

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If you have used Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) you may have experienced that node groups' autoscaling leaves a bit to be desired. It can be slow, clunky to configure, and making use of mixed instance types can be difficult. My biggest complaint? Nodes launch SLOW!

Enter Karpenter. Karpenter is a node provisioner - which now uses the NodePool terminology, similar to GKE and others - that utilizes the EC2 Fleet API to schedule nodes directly to the cluster, without having to be in a managed node group!

Why would you want to do this? How about nodes that launch and reach Ready state in k8s in 10 seconds!

Read on to see how you can scale faster, more reliably, with greater flexibility, and save money by using Karpenter.