Posted On: Jul 13, 2023
Today, AWS announced Windows support on Karpenter (Starting with v0.29.0), the open-source node provisioning and management project. Using Karpenter, customers can now quickly scale their Amazon EKS clusters running Windows with right-sized Amazon EC2 instances in response to changing application load. Karpenter helps customers optimize their operational overhead and costs during this process without manually adjusting the compute capacity of their clusters, overprovisioning compute to meet rapidly changing demand, or creating multiple EC2 Autoscaling Groups (ASGs).
Karpenter is a flexible, high-performance Kubernetes node provisioning and management solution that helps improve application availability, operational overhead, and cluster compute utilization by launching new EC2 instances that are best fit to the scale, scheduling, and resource requirements of the workloads in a cluster. When Karpenter is installed in your cluster, it .it automatically launches EC2 instances to meet applications’ compute needs, upgrades them to improve security, and optimizes the instances launched to lower costs. By doing this, Karpenter reduces the scheduling latencies and infrastructure costs of your cluster. With the launch of v0.29.0, Karpenter extends the automated node provisioning support for Windows containers running on EKS.
Windows containers on Amazon EKS are supported in all public AWS regions and the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions as listed here. To learn more about running Windows containers on Amazon EKS, visit the EKS best practices guide and Amazon EKS Optimized Windows AMI documentation.