Karpenter on AKS in 2026: What Actually Works
Karpenter on AKS has gone from "interesting experiment" to "something you can actually run in production" with some caveats that will save you a weekend of pain if you read them now. This post is a field report, not a sales pitch.
The Short Version
If you're running homogeneous, predictable workloads and you're happy with cluster-autoscaler (CAS), stay there. CAS is boring, it works, and Azure supports it fully. If you're running GPU workloads, spot-heavy batch pipelines, or you need bin-packing that doesn't require you to pre-define a node pool for every VM SKU you might want, Karpenter is now worth the operational overhead.
What Karpenter Actually Does on AKS
