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 🎧 Listen, then go deeper — DevOps & Cloud interview-prep ebooks at DevOpsInterview.Cloud