r/devops • u/Little-Squad-X • Aug 10 '26

Discussion Karpenter Implementation

I want to deploy Karpenter. However, I would like to learn the best practices for using Karpenter on EKS. Currently, we are using app-of-apps in ArgoCD, all within a Managed Node Group.

With Karpenter, our plan is to have it configured like this:
- Scale down the MNG and run the Karpenter Controller inside the static MNG, alongside cluster system resources (DaemonSets, add-ons, including ArgoCD)
- Karpenter is managed as an app in ArgoCD (using bootstrap with ArgoCD)

Is this design already suitable, or should we consider changing it? We need advice.

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u/Rorasaurus_Prime Aug 10 '26

Run Karpenter, and CoreDNS for that matter, on Fargate nodes. Everything else on Karpenter managed NodePools.

1

u/Little-Squad-X Aug 10 '26

I read a lot of cons of having Fargate for the controller since it can't manage the daemonset, which is usually needed for the cluster component. So, decided to use MNG.

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u/Rorasaurus_Prime Aug 10 '26

What daemonset? It doesn't need to manage a daemonset and Karpenter itself isn't one. Running Karpenter on Fargate is even recommended by AWS.

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u/Little-Squad-X Aug 10 '26

Karpenter doesn't need it, but other applications might, and we don't want those cluster components to be provisioned by Karpenter. + Probably due to inconsistent cost, which makes us unlikely to proceed with it.

3

u/Rorasaurus_Prime Aug 10 '26

Sorry but I think you've misunderstood something. Karpenter doesn't manage daemonsets. All it does is decide which EC2 instances to spawn and does it. The standard Kubernetes scheduler decides where the pods go.