Karpenter observes Kubernetes pods and launches nodes in response to those pods’ scheduling constraints. Karpenter does not perform the actual scheduling and instead waits for kube-scheduler to schedule the pods. When running in AWS, Karpenter is typically installed onto EC2 instances that run in EKS Clusters. Karpenter relies on public facing AWS APIs and standard IAM Permissions. Karpenter uses AWS-SDK-Go v1, and AWS advises that credentials are provided using IAM Roles for Service Accounts.
