How does karpenter decide which node to schedule the pod on?

[xaka]

It seems to be random the way I see it, which in many cases leads to underutilized nodes, which in turn leads to consolidation happening too often.

I wonder if there is a way to tell the scheduler to place pods on nodes with highest utilization first?

Pretty much I want to increase a density and avoid pod eviction as much as possible. I know there is "do-not-disrupt" pod annotation, but it doesn't really address the issue here. Instead - it leads to too many nodes with fewer workloads on it.

May be pod affinity policy is the way to accomplish what I'm after. Not quite sure yet.