Karpenter available on dev Clusters – Next Step: Production!

Hello all,

Have you noticed Karpenter is now available for your dev clusters? The feedback has been pretty awesome so far. People are loving the cost savings and how much more stable everything has become. With all this good news, guess what’s next? Yes, we’re working on making it available for your production clusters!

To make this possible, we are working on several improvements:

Instance Type Selection

Today, users do not have an easy way to control the node instance type where applications are deployed.

Solution: We will integrate a new feature, allowing users to specify instance types (per arch, size, family, or category). We are currently working on the design, have a look to our design draft :point_right:

Spot Instances at Service Level

Currently, the spot instances feature is available at the cluster level. If a user needs an on-demand instance for a specific application, there is no easy way to specify this. But soon :slight_smile:

Solution: For now we will provide documentation explaining how to achieve this using the advanced settings. This will be integrated into the product later.

AMI Instances

With the Auto-scaler/Karpenter, we currently use the latest version for AMI instances. However, the Karpenter documentation advises against this for production as nodes tend to restart more frequently, increasing the chances of AMI version changes.

Solution: We will add an advanced setting with the latest version set by default, but users will have the option to select their preferred version if necessary.

Resource Limits for Nodepools

Currently, there are no limits on the number of nodes, which can result in excessive node counts and then increase the cluster costs.

Solution: We will add CPU/Memory limits in the advanced settings. These limits will be applied to each node pool individually.

Once Karpenter will be available on production clusters, we will plan the migration from Auto-Scaler to Karpenter for all clusters!

We’ll keep you updated on the progress and availability of these features. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions or feedback!

Julien