karpenter | Roberto Bandini

In the previous post, Boost Your EKS Efficiency: Migrating from Cluster-Autoscaler to Karpenter, we added Karpenter to our AWS EKS reachable by private VPN and created via Terraform.
We can then deploy our applications and scale them in the most appropriate way.
However, we also need to be able to monitor our applications and the infrastructure they use.
But what is the fastest and most efficient way to monitor a Kubernetes cluster and its nodes, both Linux and Windows?

There is a stack called kube-prometheus that was created specifically to provide a ready-made and complete solution that includes everything needed to monitor your Kubernetes cluster.
In this way, in one go we install not only Prometheus, Grafana and also other necessary software such as the exporter for Windows nodes, but we already have all the configurations, dashboards and alarms ready, prepared by a specialized community.

Kubernetes cluster monitoring using kube-prometheus

In this post we will see how to install kube-prometheus on our test infrastructure via Terraform in the fastest way to be ready to monitor our microservices.

In the previous post How to create an AWS EKS cluster with VPN access using Terraform, we had deployed cluster-autoscaler on our EKS to be able to automatically scale managed node groups.

Let’s now see how to deploy Karpenter on EKS via Terraform and then how to migrate from cluster-autoscaler to Karpenter.

We do this because Karpenter is a sort of evolution of cluster-autoscaler and has several advantages: not only is it faster and allows us to go beyond the constraints of managed node groups, but it allows us to better optimize costs and make development teams more autonomous.