General guidance request for ec2 (non EKS) Karpenter requirements

[darth-drew]

Has anyone had any luck installing Karpenter into an EC2 based cluster that was not originally built with EKS? I have read through a lot of documentation, articles, and scanned the issues/discussions here but so far have not had much luck finding a solid guide on the topic.

So far, outside of just installing karpenter, I have identified (or perhaps misidentified) that I also need to have eks-connector running in the cluster (to get a "ClusterName"), but now the controller is in CLBO with "panic: XXX not a valid CLUSTER_ENDPOINT URL". From what I can gather, EKS will configure cluster endpoints for you automatically. I am hopeful someone out there can point me in the right direction or let me know if I am going down a rabbit hole here.

For what it's worth, this is a terraform provisioned RKE environment in a public/private VPC. I have also registered this cluster to EKS as EC2, Rancher, and Other.

Thank you for your time.

[DacoDev]

To use Karpenter, you must be running a supported Kubernetes cluster on a supported cloud provider.
https://karpenter.sh/docs/getting-started/getting-started-with-karpenter/

That line from the documents feels like it's burying the lede since it appears that it doesn't work on a non-EKS AWS cluster, and the forked Azure Karpenter provider appears to only work with AKS (both the self-hosted and "NAP" feature).

I tried for a few hours to get Karpenter working on my kubeadm created cluster on EC2 instances but hit roadblock-after-roadblock of missing endpoints and permissions and resources that Karpenter was looking to have installed but that weren't available to it on the instance/self-created cluster. I went back to the normal cluster-autoscaler.

It doesn't feel like something that should have to be so control-plane specific that it couldn't be made to work with other cluster types.