Karpenter Consolidation & Drift: 2 AM Node Cleanup

Your cluster is burning 50 nodes at 10% utilization at 2 AM with a stale AMI — here's exactly how Karpenter's disruption engine handles both problems automatically.

You'll learn:

• Setting consolidationPolicy: WhenEmptyOrUnderutilized with a consolidateAfter: 30s window to drain and terminate underutilized nodes
• How Karpenter's drift detection compares live node spec against the current NodeClass — and marks nodes drifted when the AMI changes
• Using expireAfter: 720h to force a rolling node refresh every 30 days as a TTL safety net
• Why consolidation, drift, and expiration are all forms of the same primitive: Karpenter's disruption mechanism

Keywords: Karpenter consolidation, Karpenter drift detection, node expiration TTL, Kubernetes node lifecycle, Karpenter NodePool disruption

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