Karpenter

Karpenter is an open-source Kubernetes node autoscaler originally built at Amazon Web Services and announced in 2021. The project automatically launches and terminates compute capacity based on unscheduled pods, supporting cost optimization and performance tuning for Kubernetes clusters.

Karpenter graduated to general availability as part of Amazon EKS in 2022, and AWS contributed the vendor-neutral core to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) through Kubernetes SIG Autoscaling in 2023.

Karpenter is not a separate company; it is an open-source project stewarded primarily by Amazon Web Services and maintained by the Kubernetes community under Apache 2.0.