Karpenter Spot Interruption: Fallback & Graceful Drain

When AWS fires the 2-minute Spot reclaim notice, Karpenter's interruption queue is the difference between a blip and a batch job disaster — here's exactly how to configure it.

You'll learn:

• How to set karpenter.sh/capacity-type in a NodePool to prefer Spot with automatic On-Demand fallback
• The full interruption flow: SQS queue → cordon → graceful drain → pod rescheduling, all within the 2-minute window
• Why the order of values in the capacity-type array doesn't control selection — Karpenter uses price-capacity optimization
• When to use strict values: ['spot'] and what happens when capacity dries up
• Why Pod Disruption Budgets and gracefulTerminationPeriod are non-negotiable for fault-tolerant batch workloads

Keywords: Karpenter Spot interruption handling, Spot instance fallback on-demand, NodePool capacity type configuration, Kubernetes batch workload cost optimization, Spot 2-minute warning drain

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