Amazon EKS clusters using Karpenter can respond to availability zone issues by automatically shifting in-cluster traffic away from affected zones, preventing disruption of workloads with strict affinity requirements and halting scheduling or capacity provisioning in impaired zones.
This automation maintains application availability across multiple AZs by coordinating with ARC resources and supports both manual and automatic zonal shifts, resuming normal operations once impairments clear. This feature requires minimal user configuration and is available via Karpenter’s settings.
Source & further reading
Karpenter now supports Amazon Application Recovery Controller zonal shift ↗Source published 2026-05-12. This report was prepared with AI assistance from the linked primary-source material. Claims and limitations should be checked against the original announcement or research.