Karpenter Multi-Team Clusters: NodePools, Weights & Isolation

Architecting a single Karpenter cluster for ML, Backend, and Batch teams means getting NodePool weights and taint-based isolation right — or pods land somewhere expensive and wrong.

You'll learn:

• How to define separate NodePools per team — ml-gpu (p3/p4 instances), backend (m5/m6), and batch-spot (Spot, any family)
• How Karpenter's spec.weight field drives pool selection: higher weight wins, ties break randomly
• The exact selection sequence — Karpenter first finds every pool that can satisfy the pod, then ranks by weight
• Why taints alone aren't enough: pairing gpu=true:NoSchedule and spot=true:NoSchedule with matching tolerations gives you hard isolation
• Senior gotcha: labels control scheduling preference, taints enforce it — you need both for airtight multi-team separation

Keywords: Karpenter NodePool weights, multi-team Kubernetes cluster, Karpenter GPU NodePool, Karpenter spot instances, Kubernetes taint isolation

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