Posted On: Feb 6, 2024

Starting with today’s release of v0.34.0, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) customers using the open-source Karpenter project have a new way to control how and when disruptive changes are made to the Amazon EC2 instances in their Kubernetes clusters. You can use Karpenter with EKS to help improve application availability, lower operational overhead, and increase cost-efficiency. Disruption controls offer deeper configuration for the automatic EC2 instance management capabilities of Karpenter so that you can fine-tune them for your specific needs and use cases.

Disruption controls give you more control over how Karpenter terminates EC2 instances to improve the balance between cost-efficiency, security, and application availability. In Karpenter’s NodePool configuration, you can now set disruption budgets for the EC2 instances provisioned by Karpenter, either as a percent or absolute value, to limit the impact to your application availability. These budgets can also be scheduled to only apply at certain times of the day, days of the week, or all the time so that you can further limit changes during critical business periods.

Get started with disruption controls for Karpenter by upgrading to v0.34.0, or later, and read more about this feature in the Karpenter Disruption documentation.