As the climate impact of cloud computing grows, carbon aware computing offers a promising way to cut emissions without compromising performance. By shifting workloads to times of lower carbon intensity on the power grid, we can achieve significant emissions reductions—often 10–30%—with no code changes to the underlying task.

In this talk, we’ll explore the principles behind carbon-aware computing, walk through how these ideas translate to actionable reductions in Airflow, and introduce the open-source CarbonAware provider for Airflow. We’ll also highlight how Airflow’s deferable operators, task metadata, and flexible execution model make it uniquely well suited for temporal shifting based on grid carbon intensity.

Attendees will walk away with practical tools to make their workflows more sustainable—and a deeper understanding of how orchestration can play a role in climate-conscious engineering.