The future of Kubernetes at AWS: Slack, Anthropic lead a "Karpenter" love-in

Hammer down those AWS bills, chisel away at that scheduling latency; pick a carpentry tool, pick your clumsy metaphor...

, and Edward Targett

December 11, 2023 . 5:10 PM

5 min read

Slack’s Director of Engineering Alex Demitri and Anthropic systems lead Nova DasSarma were quite the draw at re:Invent earlier this month; or perhaps it was the subject matter – the future of Kubernetes at AWS.

Regardless, two queues (pre-booked to the left, late chancers to the right) lined a full corridor at the Venetian and then overflowed down two opposing walls at the far end, as harried event staff attempted to maintain order amongst this large cluster of Kubernetes-hungry developers.

The Stack, outnumbered and unticketed, had to abandon hopes of catching the session in favour of pizza, beer, and small-talk about welding (we’re not sure either) with a well known CISO – but caught it on-demand to provide a recap for our readers. Before we get deeper, a flying top-level overview...

The future of Kubernetes at AWS: The Karpenters...

Karpenter, released by AWS in 2021 and later donated to the CNCF, makes it easier to optimise compute for Kubernetes. It "observes the aggregate resource requests of unscheduled pods and makes decisions to launch and terminate nodes to minimize scheduling latencies."

1: AWS has made a host of updates to its managed Kubernetes service EKS over the year and is promising more. Hosting the session, Nathan Taber, AWS Kubernetes Head of Product and Advocacy pointed to, in brief: