However, after checking the Karpenter logs, I was able to confirm that Karpenter was terminating these nodes because of node consolidation. But that’s not what we see: after a node consolidation event, the available capacity stays constant. To understand what’s happening here, we need to know about two things: what’s running on this cluster, and how Karpenter’s node consolidation works. Let’s first talk about Karpenter node consolidation, because I hear a lot of lies subtly imprecise discussion about how it works. The answer is node consolidation.