Karpenter is an open-source node provisioning project built for Kubernetes. Adding Karpenter to a Kubernetes cluster can dramatically improve the efficiency and cost of running workloads on that cluster. Karpenter is tightly integrated with Kubernetes features to make sure that the right types and amounts of compute resources are available to pods as they are needed. Karpenter works by:
- Watching for pods that the Kubernetes scheduler has marked as unschedulable
- Evaluating scheduling constraints (resource requests, nodeselectors, affinities, tolerations, and topology spread constraints) requested by the pods
- Provisioning nodes that meet the requirements of the pods
- Scheduling the pods to run on the new nodes
- Removing the nodes when the nodes are no longer needed
