The open-source node provisioning and management project Karpenter will now support Windows, according to an announcement from AWS (starting with v0.29.0). Customers may now swiftly scale their Windows-based Amazon EKS clusters with appropriately scaled Amazon EC2 instances using Karpenter in reaction to shifting application load. Without manually altering the compute capacity of their clusters, overprovisioning compute to keep up with constantly changing demand, or setting up multiple EC2 Autoscaling Groups (ASGs), Karpenter helps customers manage their operational overhead and expenses throughout this process.

When Karpenter is installed in your cluster, it monitors the aggregate resource needs of unscheduled pods and decides whether to launch new nodes or deprovision nodes depending on the need for additional capacity. Karpenter lowers your cluster’s infrastructure costs and scheduling latencies in this way.

Prerequisites

• Ensure you are running eksctl commands with an AWS Identify and Access Management (AWS IAM) profile that has permissions to create and manage Amazon EKS. This AWS IAM security principal is used in the Getting Started section below for the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) configuration.
• Ensure you are using eksctl v0.124.0 or higher to operate Karpenter.
• Follow the Getting Started section in the Amazon EKS documentation to install aws cli, kubectl, and eksctl on your development machine.
• Alternatively, you could leverage Cloud9 or Cloudshell to handle deployment and maintenance tasks.