Over the past decade, our society has become increasingly reliant on software. Companies across the globe are developing software not only to enhance value for their employees but also to serve their customers better. However, a significant portion of this software ultimately resides in data centers—either managed by the organization itself or by cloud providers. Unfortunately, this trend contributes to a staggering 3% of the global carbon footprint.
Recently, a critical shift has occurred: the proliferation of AI and ML workloads is driving enterprises to deploy larger and more resource-intensive applications in our data centers. As a result, the carbon footprint associated with data centers is growing by 2% annually due to AI-related demands. If we fail to transform our cloud-native culture, this trajectory could lead to data centers consuming a whopping 15% of the global carbon footprint, surpassing even the airline industry.
In this enlightening talk, we will explore solutions that allow us to optimize our environment and reduce unnecessary workloads. To enhance the energy efficiency of our Kubernetes (k8s) clusters, we must:
1. Measure and Understand Current Usage: Gain insights into how our environment consumes resources.
2. Use Energy Usage as a Global KPI: Prioritize energy efficiency across all our projects.
3. Dismantle Testing Environments When Not in Use: Avoid unnecessary resource consumption.
4. Continuously Optimize Resource Allocation for k8s Workloads: Fine-tune our cluster for efficiency.
During this session, we’ll also introduce several valuable CNCF projects, including Kepler, KubeGreen, and Vcluster. Let’s collectively shape a greener future for cloud-native engineering! 🌿🚀

This presentation will be structured into several parts:
- Introduction to data center consumption
- Measuring consumption with Kepler
- Validating your releases using Kepler in your quality gates
- Optimizing your clusters
- Shutting down your test environments: Kubegreen
- Demonstration

Here is a GitHub repository containing the workshop with some of the resources: https://github.com/henrikrexed/Sustainability-workshop

Talk/demo conducted during Sustainability Week: https://youtu.be/qthk0dbzFMk https://www.youtube.com/isitobservable

Talk at KubeCon Europe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykq1F_3PmJw