KubeCon + CloudNativeCon India 2025

Managing node churn in large Amazon EKS clusters posed challenges due to fluctuating workloads, leading to instability and high costs. In this session, we’ll share how we leveraged Karpenter, an open-source K8s autoscaler, to optimize node provisioning and minimize churn across multiple EKS clusters. We’ll explore strategies like Pod Priority, PDBs, and node pools, improving scheduling efficiency and reducing resource waste thereby reducing cloud costs. Additionally, we’ll discuss reducing do-not-disrupt annotations, tightening affinity rules, aligning Karpenter nodes with EC2 savings plans and using latest features of karpenter like reserved instances to enhance performance and cost savings. One can gain insights into understanding node churning and its impact on costs and stability, optimizing Karpenter to scale nodes efficiently, achieving cost savings through spot instances and refined scaling policies. Join us to learn how to make EKS clusters more efficient and cost-effective!