Karpenter has emerged as the most advanced node scheduling technology for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) in the market. It has emerged as a powerful alternative to Cluster Autoscaler, offering many advantages over the traditional solution.

In this essential guide, we’ll cover how to migrate from Cluster Autoscaler to Karpenter using EKS Managed Node Groups or Fargate, with step-by-step technical instructions and code you can download right from GitHub.

Why migrate to Karpenter

Karpenter is a high-performance open-source Kubernetes cluster autoscaler developed by Amazon Web Services. What’s great about Karpenter is it improves application availability and cluster efficiency by rapidly launching right-sized compute resources in response to changing application load – enabling it to deliver superior performance, especially in dynamic and large-scale environments.

But Karpenter has become more than just an autoscaler. Teams are embracing Karpenter as an elegant and efficient way to manage their workloads, because it provides a high level of control over scheduling decisions and resource allocation. These increased control and automation capabilities unlock new possibilities across dimensions like:

  • Better efficiency and cost savings from dynamic resource allocation and high-efficiency scaling

  • Spot instance utilization and native integration

  • More availability by rapidly scaling resources to meet demand

  • Automated and simplified node management

And with the recent release of Karpenter 1.0 General Availability (GA), the technology has reached a level of maturity that many organizations have been waiting for, even as others have already been running it successfully in production.

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It takes just 20 minutes to migrate to Karpenter

Migrating to Karpenter via EKS managed node groups or Fargate is straightforward thanks to its compatibility with existing Kubernetes clusters and its ability to leverage standard Kubernetes resources.

You simply install Karpenter on your cluster, configure a few provisioning specifications based on your needs, and it seamlessly takes over the node provisioning process. This means there’s minimal disruption to your existing operations.

Check out the instructions below.

How to migrate from Cluster Autoscaler to Karpenter using EKS Managed Node Groups

First, let’s go over the process of migrating to Karpenter using EKS Managed Node Groups (later, we’ll talk about how to migrate to Karpenter with Fargate).

Clone the following repository:
https://github.com/nops-io/nops-infra-templates/tree/main

Go to the following folder and follow the instructions:

https://github.com/nops-io/nops-infra-templates/tree/main/karpenter-migration-managed-node-group

How to migrate from Cluster Autoscaler to Karpenter using Fargate

Migrating to Fargate offers a serverless experience, eliminating the need to manage underlying infrastructure, which simplifies operations and reduces overhead. It’s ideal for variable workloads due to its automatic scaling and ensures high availability and reliability without the need for manual intervention in node management. (For predictable workloads, you may want to use the managed node groups method detailed above).

Clone the following repository:
https://github.com/nops-io/nops-infra-templates/tree/main

Go to the following folderand follow the instructions:

https://github.com/nops-io/nops-infra-templates/tree/main/karpenter-migration-fargate

The future of autoscaling with Karpenter

As more organizations continue to adopt Karpenter, we’re moving towards a future where the complexities of cluster management are increasingly automated, allowing engineering teams to focus on higher-level strategic initiatives.

If you’re looking to optimize your Kubernetes infrastructure with greater precision, efficiency and confidence, Karpenter + nOps is even better.

nOps helps engineering teams to more easily and effectively leverage the power of Karpenter for cost savings and reliability. It constantly tunes your Karpenter configurations for better performance at lower price.

nOps adds to Karpenter organization-wide awareness of your RI and SP, intelligent instance selection, Spot instance diversification, instance lifespan optimization, real-time workload reconsideration and more:

nOps was recently ranked #1 in G2’s cloud cost management category.

Book a demo to find out how nOps can help you with your Karpenter migration.