Karpenter in Production: Architecting Cost-Efficient K8s Clusters

Karpenter has changed how we manage Kubernetes nodes on EKS — but deploying it is just the beginning. The real savings come from how you architect your NodePools, split workloads between Spot and On-Demand instances, and configure consolidation policies.

In this session, we’ll explore Karpenter’s configuration capabilities in depth: NodePool strategies (e.g., 50/50 Spot/On-Demand split), instance type diversification, disruption budgets, and consolidation tuning.

A significant portion of the talk is a live demo where we’ll show how Karpenter works during scaling events (scaling to 3,000 pods), observe consolidation in real time, and demonstrate splitting workloads 50/50 across On-Demand and Spot instances.

You’ll leave with concrete configurations ready to deploy in your own clusters.