Karpenter aims to enhance both the effectiveness and affordability of managing workloads within a Kubernetes cluster. The core mechanics of Karpenter involve:

Monitoring unscheduled pods identified by the Kubernetes scheduler.
Scrutinizing the scheduling constraints, including resource requests, node selectors, affinities, tolerations, and topology spread constraints, as stipulated by the pods.
Provisioning nodes that precisely align with the pods’ requirements.
Streamlining cluster resource usage by removing nodes once their services are no longer required.

In this article, I talk about how to set up and use Karpenter for managing worker nodes in EKS.