Considering Karpenter?
Read the Ultimate Guide for Engineering Leaders.
How to improve efficiency and reduce unnecessary spend with Karpenter
Many teams are finding that Cluster Autoscaler’s capabilities are limited compared to today’s workloads, leading to:
- Overprovisioning, idle nodes, and waste
- High EKS bills
- Wasted time and manual overhead
- Difficulties with Spot usage
- Performance issues and scaling delays
Find out how the next-generation autoscaler Karpenter scales more automatically and efficiently, freeing your team from extensive management and budgeting fire drills.
High-level comparison of Karpenter & Cluster Autoscaler
Karpenter has emerged as the most effective node scheduling technology for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) in the current market.
| Karpenter | Cluster Autoscaler | |
|---|---|---|
| Resource Management | Proactively and cost-efficiently manages resource allocation, adjusting based on workload needs. | Adjusts node count based on utilization, potentially causing resource waste. |
| Node Management | Precisely automates node scaling and provisioning through provisioners. | Reactively scales node groups but lacks the ability to fine-tune node parameters on the fly. |
| Node removal | Offers fine-grained control over node termination based factors such as cost, usage patterns, maintenance, etc. | Lacks customization for managing node lifecycles in modern workloads. |
| Autoscaling | Provides fast, granular scaling based on actual usage, dynamically optimizing resources. | Slower, node-level scaling, with less efficiency and flexibility. |
| Scheduling | Supports advanced scheduling and affinity rules (e.g. if you have specific requirements for workload distribution or strict resource constraints). | Minimal control over scheduling based on availability zones or costs. |
| Spot | Natively integrates with Spot, optimizing cost by mixing On-Demand and Spot. | Does not manage Spot instances or optimize cost natively. |
Why we love Karpenter
Organizations are saving 40-60%+ with better performance by switching to Karpenter. And with the release of Karpenter 1.0 General Availability, the technology has reached a level of maturity many organizations have been waiting for.
| Advantages | Efficient and Reliable EKS Cluster Scaling
Dynamically provisions and scales compute resources based on real-time demand |
Karpenter is Easy to Use
Simplifies cluster management & reduces time spent configuring |
Open Source and multi-cloud supported by CNCF & AWS
Ensures robust, reliable & cross-platform compatibility |
| Key Benefits | Extensible Configurations
Define classes of nodes and associate pools for more control over resource usage per application Resource requestsDefine safe CPU and Memory thresholds for your cluster Topology Spread & Pod affinity/anti-affinityReduce down time based on the loss of a node or availability zone Resource WeightingReduce down time based on the loss of a node or availability zone |
Simple Helm Chart Upgrades
Apply a new helm chart to upgrade your version of Karpenter ensuring simple, version-controlled improvements Configured in one serviceControl your node configuration with one configuration rather than using multiple proprietary services for scaling and configuration |
CNCF Open Source Project
Accepted by the CNCF community as a supported project within the Kubernetes ecosystem ensuring high quality and innovation Multi-cloud SupportedKarpenter has expanded to allow its use across additional clouds such as Azure while becoming more platform agnostic AWS CertifiedOriginally developed by AWS, Karpenter is supported both by the general open source community and dedicated AWS resources |