What if we didn’t have to worry about configuring Node Groups or right-sizing compute resources beforehand in our Kubernetes infrastructure? You read it right, Karpenter does not use Node Groups to manage the workload. Instead, it uses Launch Templates for nodes and manages each instance directly without configuring any orchestration mechanism. Karpenter allows you to take full advantage of the cloud’s flexibility. Before Karpenter, Kubernetes users had to use Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling Groups and the Kubernetes Cluster Autoscaler or some custom script cron job to dynamically adjust their cluster compute capacity. In this article, we will cover in detail how to improve the efficiency and cost of running workloads in Kubernetes using Karpenter.
What Is Karpenter?
Karpenter is an open-source provisioner tool that can quickly deploy Kubernetes infrastructure with the right nodes at the right time. It significantly improves the efficiency and cost of running workloads on a cluster. It automatically provisions new nodes in response to un-schedulable pods.