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Automatic already defaults to Cilium and only locks the system node pool, not workload nodes — the CNI conflict that ruled out EKS Auto Mode doesn't exist here. The measured cost is a permanent +17.5% per vCPU-hour on top of a flat control-plane delta, weighed against SLA and day-2 ops the factory would otherwise own. Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The per-vCPU surcharge isn't a percentage of what the node costs, it's a fixed dollar amount — so it barely registers against On-Demand (+17.5%) but nearly doubles Spot (+94.7%), since the same fixed tax lands on a much smaller base price. Against that, Automatic's own case narrows to a pod-readiness SLA and not having to pick an upgrade channel — not enough to keep paying a tax that erases most of the reason to use Spot in the first place. NAP itself is unaffected: same engine, opt-in and explicit on Standard instead of preconfigured. Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Garinlu
changed the title
Automatic's tax doesn't erase Spot's savings on compute — that discount stays intact. What's actually true: the tax itself is fixed, so it doesn't shrink with Spot the way the compute price does, and ends up costing nearly as much as the Spot VM it's added to. Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Garinlu
marked this pull request as ready for review
September 15, 2026 08:04
A reviewer question surfaced this as worth stating explicitly rather than leaving implicit: verified against the retail price list that the per-category compute surcharge only exists under the Automatic product, not Standard — so NAP costs the same as running Karpenter self-hosted, it just removes the operational burden. Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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UlysseCarpentier
approved these changes
Sep 17, 2026
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Summary
Test plan
docs/aws/anddocs/gcp/.