How I Cut AWS Compute Costs by 70% with a Multi-Arch EKS Cluster and Karpenter

Swapping out Kubernetes Cluster Autoscaler for Karpenter cut node launch times to under 20 seconds and dropped compute bills by 70%. The secret sauce? Smarter, faster spot instance scaling.

Bonus perks: architecture-aware scheduling for multi-CPU (ARM64/x86) workloads—more performance, better utilization. It even cleaned up IAM by leaning on OIDC and IRSA.

System shift: Karpenter and friends are rewriting infra playbooks. Static node groups are out. Dynamic, workload-first scaling is in.