Settings

Karpenter surfaces environment variables and CLI parameters to allow you to configure certain global settings on the controllers. These settings are described below.

Environment Variable	CLI Flag	Description
ASSUME_ROLE_ARN	--assume-role-arn	Role to assume for calling AWS services.
ASSUME_ROLE_DURATION	--assume-role-duration	Duration of assumed credentials in minutes. Default value is 15 minutes. Not used unless aws.assumeRole set. (default = 15m0s)
BATCH_IDLE_DURATION	--batch-idle-duration	The maximum amount of time with no new pending pods that if exceeded ends the current batching window. If pods arrive faster than this time, the batching window will be extended up to the maxDuration. If they arrive slower, the pods will be batched separately. (default = 1s)
BATCH_MAX_DURATION	--batch-max-duration	The maximum length of a batch window. The longer this is, the more pods we can consider for provisioning at one time which usually results in fewer but larger nodes. (default = 10s)
CLUSTER_CA_BUNDLE	--cluster-ca-bundle	Cluster CA bundle for nodes to use for TLS connections with the API server. If not set, this is taken from the controller’s TLS configuration.
CLUSTER_ENDPOINT	--cluster-endpoint	The external kubernetes cluster endpoint for new nodes to connect with. If not specified, will discover the cluster endpoint using DescribeCluster API.
CLUSTER_NAME	--cluster-name	[REQUIRED] The kubernetes cluster name for resource discovery.
DISABLE_WEBHOOK	--disable-webhook	Disable the admission and validation webhooks
ENABLE_PROFILING	--enable-profiling	Enable the profiling on the metric endpoint
FEATURE_GATES	--feature-gates	Optional features can be enabled / disabled using feature gates. Current options are: Drift (default = Drift=false)
HEALTH_PROBE_PORT	--health-probe-port	The port the health probe endpoint binds to for reporting controller health (default = 8081)
INTERRUPTION_QUEUE	--interruption-queue	Interruption queue is disabled if not specified. Enabling interruption handling may require additional permissions on the controller service account. Additional permissions are outlined in the docs.
ISOLATED_VPC	--isolated-vpc	If true, then assume we can’t reach AWS services which don’t have a VPC endpoint. This also has the effect of disabling look-ups to the AWS pricing endpoint.
KARPENTER_SERVICE	--karpenter-service	The Karpenter Service name for the dynamic webhook certificate
KUBE_CLIENT_BURST	--kube-client-burst	The maximum allowed burst of queries to the kube-apiserver (default = 300)
KUBE_CLIENT_QPS	--kube-client-qps	The smoothed rate of qps to kube-apiserver (default = 200)
LEADER_ELECT	--leader-elect	Start leader election client and gain leadership before executing the main loop. Enable this when running replicated components for high availability.
LOG_LEVEL	--log-level	Log verbosity level. Can be one of ‘debug’, ‘info’, or ‘error’
MEMORY_LIMIT	--memory-limit	Memory limit on the container running the controller. The GC soft memory limit is set to 90% of this value. (default = -1)
METRICS_PORT	--metrics-port	The port the metric endpoint binds to for operating metrics about the controller itself (default = 8000)
RESERVED_ENIS	--reserved-enis	Reserved ENIs are not included in the calculations for max-pods or kube-reserved. This is most often used in the VPC CNI custom networking setup https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eks/latest/userguide/cni-custom-network.html. (default = 0)
VM_MEMORY_OVERHEAD_PERCENT	--vm-memory-overhead-percent	The VM memory overhead as a percent that will be subtracted from the total memory for all instance types. (default = 0.075)
WEBHOOK_METRICS_PORT	--webhook-metrics-port	The port the webhook metric endpoing binds to for operating metrics about the webhook (default = 8001)
WEBHOOK_PORT	--webhook-port	The port the webhook endpoint binds to for validation and mutation of resources (default = 8443)

Feature Gates

Karpenter uses feature gates You can enable the feature gates through the --feature-gates CLI environment variable or the FEATURE_GATES environment variable in the Karpenter deployment. For example, you can configure drift by setting the following CLI argument: --feature-gates Drift=true.

Feature	Default	Stage	Since	Until
Drift	false	Alpha	v0.21.x	v0.32.x
Drift	true	Beta	v0.33.x

Batching Parameters

The batching parameters control how Karpenter batches an incoming stream of pending pods. Reducing these values may trade off a slightly faster time from pending pod to node launch, in exchange for launching smaller nodes. Increasing the values can do the inverse. Karpenter provides reasonable defaults for these values, but if you have specific knowledge about your workloads you can tweak these parameters to match the expected rate of incoming pods.

For a standard deployment scale-up, the pods arrive at the QPS setting of the kube-controller-manager, and the default values are typically fine. These settings are intended for use cases where other systems may create large numbers of pods over a period of many seconds or minutes and there is a desire to batch them together.

Batch Idle Duration

The batch idle duration duration is the period of time that a new pending pod extends the current batching window. This can be increased to handle scenarios where pods arrive slower than one second part, but it would be preferable if they were batched together onto a single larger node.

This value is expressed as a string value like 10s, 1m or 2h45m. The valid time units are ns, us (or µs), ms, s, m, h.

Batch Max Duration

The batch max duration is the maximum period of time a batching window can be extended to. Increasing this value will allow the maximum batch window size to increase to collect more pending pods into a single batch at the expense of a longer delay from when the first pending pod was created.

This value is expressed as a string value like 10s, 1m or 2h45m. The valid time units are ns, us (or µs), ms, s, m, h.