Your cluster is burning 50 nodes at 10% utilization at 2 AM with a stale AMI — here's exactly how Karpenter's disruption engine handles both problems automatically.
You'll learn:
- Setting consolidationPolicy: WhenEmptyOrUnderutilized with a consolidateAfter: 30s window to drain and terminate underutilized nodes
- How Karpenter's drift detection compares live node spec against the current NodeClass — and marks nodes drifted when the AMI changes
- Using expireAfter: 720h to force a rolling node refresh every 30 days as a TTL safety net
- Why consolidation, drift, and expiration are all forms of the same primitive: Karpenter's disruption mechanism
Keywords: Karpenter consolidation, Karpenter drift detection, node expiration TTL, Kubernetes node lifecycle, Karpenter NodePool disruption
🎧 Listen, then go deeper — DevOps & Cloud interview-prep ebooks at DevOpsInterview.Cloud
