Karpenter is slowly but surely becoming the de-facto standard node autoscaler for Kubernetes. It started at AWS and is now getting adopted for AKS on Azure.

Many organizations already switched to Karpenter from whatever they were using - if it's the good old cluster-autoscaler or a commercial pay-to-scale solution from 3rd party vendors.

Now Karpenter is also a part of the Kubernetes autoscaling SIG. And that's why the Karpenter team decided it's a great time to promote sigs.k8s.io/karpenter to package version v1.0.0.

As the official proposal says: "The sigs.k8s.io/karpenter package has long-been in a production-ready state for users, but has not reflected this production-ready state through its versioning scheme. Given the first initial release of v1 APIs within Karpenter, the maintainer team feels this is the best time to make the bump to v1.0.0."

New Stability Guarantees

The linked issue goes on to outline the new stability guarantees - but these are of course not referring to the stability of Karpenter as a product. Instead it's talking about Karpenter APIs now being subject to standard Kubernetes stability guarantees. While the package itself may be subject to breaking changes within the v1.x.y major version without a bump to v2.x.y.

Karpenter is Maturing

All in all - this is great news. Karpenter has been reliable and cost-effective for quite some time but now it's also maturing as an OSS project and a part of the Kubernetes ecosystem.

Interested in how to get the most out of your Karpenter when combined with pod optimization? Read this post I wrote for PerfectScale a while ago.

Have you made the switch to Karpenter? Did it provide the optimization you expected? Share in comments!