Migrating to Karpenter: Fun Stories
Running multiple Kubernetes clusters on AWS with the cluster autoscaler? Every four months, you face the same grind: upgrading Kubernetes versions, recreating auto scaling groups, and hoping instance type changes stick.
Adhi Sutandi, DevOps Engineer at Beekeeper by LumApps, shares how his team migrated from the cluster autoscaler to Karpenter across eight EKS clusters — and the hard lessons they learned along the way.
In this episode:
- Why AWS auto scaling groups are immutable and how that creates upgrade bottlenecks at scale
- How the latest AMI tag accidentally turned less critical clusters into chaos engineering environments, dropping SLOs before anyone realized Karpenter was the cause
- Why pre-stop sleep hooks solved pod restartability problems that Quarkus's built-in graceful shutdown couldn't
- The case for pod disruption budgets over Karpenter annotations when protecting critical workloads during node rotations
- How Karpenter's implicit 10% disruption budget caught the team off guard — and the explicit configuration that fixed it
