Onboarding your EKS clusters to Compute Copilot for EKS
Why use Compute Copilot EKS?
Learn more about how Compute Copilot for EKS can help you to put your EKS cost optimization on auto-pilot here.
Pre-requisites:
- You must be logged in to your nOps account.
- Your AWS account must be configured to your nOps account.
- You must have Kubernetes cluster with Karpenter installed.
About Compute Copilot for EKS:
Karpenter offers significant advancements in intelligent scaling, cluster awareness, and customization. However, it is often tuned as a one-and-done — whereas your ecosystem and market pricing are constantly changing.
That’s where Compute Copilot for EKS comes in, constantly tuning your configuration for the best price and availability on autopilot. It allows engineering teams to take advantage of Karpenter’s more effective and granular scaling functionalities, for a fraction of the effort.
Compute Copilot for EKS ensures you are scheduled on the most cost-optimized and stable option at every moment — automatically updating your provisioning on the fly if not for 50+% EKS savings.
Why Compute Copilot for EKS over legacy Cluster Autoscaler:
Optimizing your AWS costs is a key challenge today. Spot can be cheaper, but terminations pose the threat of outages to your critical workloads. RIs and Savings Plans require risky, long-term commitment and can lead to paying for capacity you don’t need.
Compute Copilot for EKS continuously rightsizes, reconsiders, and re-evaluates your workload placement to available RIs, SPs, or Spot to maximize your savings on autopilot with complete reliability. It is aware of your entire dynamic AWS ecosystem and market pricing in real time.
Compute Copilot for EKS even covers your commitments with a 100% money-back guarantee. If your usage changes, you change instance regions, or even leave the cloud, we buy back those commitments from you. You get all the cost savings of commitments, with all the flexibility of on-demand. In contrast, Cluster Autoscaler requires much more of your time and labor, lacks Karpenter’s advanced autoscaling automation, and makes you choose between cost savings and flexibility.
Steps to Configure Your EKS Cluster for Cost Optimization and Savings
Install nOps Agent:
- Navigate to Compute Copilot → EKS from the nOps dashboard.
- Choose the EKS cluster you want to cost-optimize.
- Open detail view by clicking on →.
- Generate a new API key for nOps Agent.
- Copy the custom command and run it in your command line.
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Test Connectivity of nOps Agent in the Compute Copilot for EKS Dashboard.
Create Node Template:
- For the selected EKS cluster, create a Node Template.
- Assign a unique name to the Node Template.
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Choose the AMI Family from the dropdown menu.
- Add Subnet IDs manually or with Search by tags.
- Add Security Group IDs manually or with Search by tags
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Select IAM Role or use default Karpenter IAM Role
- Configure Metadata Options with user data to give commands after node starts [optional].
- Create Device Mapping by providing necessary details [optional].
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Create Node Template.
Create Provisioner:
- Assign a unique Provisioner name.
- Select the created Node Template to pull configuration from.
- Select Availability Zones.
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Select Capacity Type — Spot, On Demand or both [recommended to select both]
- Select Max Limit of vCPUs & Memory.
- Create Taints and Labels if required [for specific provisioner service].
- Choose the range of vCPUs and Memory for the instance.
- Select the appropriate instance family.
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Create Provisioners.
Once the Provisioner is created, the user can again Test Connectivity to confirm that the EKS cluster is configured correctly.
As soon as cluster status displays Configured, Compute Copilot for EKS will start its magic to generate savings on the connected EKS cluster.
FAQ
- Is Karpenter mandatory to install EKS Compute Copilot?
- Yes, currently EKS Compute Copilot works only if the clusters are being managed by Karpenter. We do have Cluster Autoscaler in our roadmap but it is not available as of now.
- Do EKS Compute Copilot Karpenter provisioners take precedence over my own Karpenter provisioners?
- Yes. Once onboarded to Compute Copilot, the provisioners already existing in the cluster are not going to be used anymore. But you don’t necessarily need to delete them. It’s just that they will not be used while Compute Copilot provisioners are there. Note: It may not always be true depending on the existing provisioners configuration.
- Can we import the YAML for existing node templates and provisioners to configure Compute Copilot EKS provisioners?
- Yes. That is absolutely possible and is shown in the above document within the “Manual Config” steps. By clicking on Manual Config, you can just copy-paste your existing YAML templates to configure nOps Karpenter provisioner
- Does nOps provide DevOps support to customers migrating from cluster autoscaler to Karpenter?
- nOps has experienced engineers who provide free of cost support to all clients to help them with Karpenter migration. You can get as much on-call support as you need to review your Karpenter settings. We also conduct monthly “Karpenter Office Hours” with our existing customer audience to build a community where we can share our experience, customers can ask questions in an open forum, see hands-on to some basic Karpenter implementation practices and much more. However, nOps is not a Service company and therefore, we do not take responsibility for your migration project or provide dedicated DevOps resources or do managed services. Our support is limited to only providing guidance and reviews. Note: If you want a recording of the most recent “Karpenter Office Hours” then please drop us an email on ‘support@nops.io’.
- Does nOps Compute Copilot for EKS support configuration of Multiple Provisioners while setting up nOps Karpenter provisioner?
- Yes, absolutely. Setting up multiple provisioners is a very common thing that customers ask for and we have made it very user friendly to configure that. You get two options to do it, configure in the UI using Auto Config or configure via existing YAML template import using Manual Config method.
- I have multiple applications running on the clusters which have different instance requirements, can Compute Copilot support different instance types in such cases?
- Yes, Compute Copilot does allow you to pick & choose only those instance types that you’d want nOps Karpenter provisioner to provision.
- Is it possible to set minimum threshold values for metrics like CPU and Memory while configuring my Karpenter provisioner in Compute Copilot?
- Yes, we allow users to set the minimum CPU and Memory metrics
- Can I put my Stateful workloads on EKS Compute Copilot?
- EKS Compute Copilot does not come with any limitation on Stateful workloads. However, we do not recommend putting Stateful Workloads on Spot Instances if they are running mission critical operations.
- How can I identify resources managed by Compute Copilot EKS?
- Compute Copilot EKS adds a common tag to all resources it manages. This is accomplished by automatically adding a tag in the
spec.tagssection of AWSNodeTemplates. The value of the tag isnops:nks:enabled=trueand it will appear on all EC2 managed by Compute Copilot EKS.
- Compute Copilot EKS adds a common tag to all resources it manages. This is accomplished by automatically adding a tag in the