I've been using Karpenter for cluster management, but our small team is finding it tough to keep up with managing multiple upgrades across different clusters. I'm considering making the switch to EKS Autopilot and wanted to hear from anyone who has experience using both. Have you found Autopilot to be effective?
2 Answers
We just made the switch to EKS auto mode and so far, it’s been smooth sailing! We manage about 40 clusters across multiple accounts, and it’s nice to have one less thing to worry about. Just make sure to budget for your costs, as they might go up a bit compared to the vanilla Karpenter.
EKS Autopilot actually uses Karpenter behind the scenes, so if you go with Autopilot, you won't have to worry about managing NodeGroups or configuring Node Pools anymore. But watch out: if you're relying on custom instance templates, you might lose that flexibility with Autopilot. It does reduce maintenance overhead, which can be a real win for smaller teams trying to avoid addon management chaos.
Did your costs increase significantly? Like around 10%?