Minimizing Energy Consumption in Bare Metal K8s Clusters - Marco Schröder & David Meder

The presentation discusses the reserves and optimization strategies for bare metal servers in a Kubernetes cluster to minimize energy consumption and costs.

• There are three types of reserves: scale out reserves for future growth, geo-resident density reserves, and peak performance reserves.
• Automation is key to quickly re-enabling hardware and minimizing energy consumption.
• Immutable infrastructure and active-active data centers help with geo-redundancy reserves.
• Transparency and buy-in from management is important for balancing potential cost savings and risks.
• The presentation emphasizes the importance of measuring and quantifying energy consumption to make informed decisions about optimization strategies.

The speaker mentions that they have identified idle consumption as one of the most expensive types of energy consumption and are working to power down machines that are not in use. They also mention the importance of automation in quickly re-enabling hardware and minimizing energy consumption.

Both rising energy cost and the need for environmental protection are strong drivers to reduce energy consumption. This applies in particular to the design and operation of infrastructures like Kubernetes, even more so if you run it on-premise on bare metal. What are the aspects that influence power consumption of your machines? What steps can be taken to reduce overall consumption of Kubernetes clusters? Does just using Kubernetes already improve your footprint? In this presentation David and Marco will explore the possibilities throughout the entire hardware and software stack: From bare metal server configuration over power management in the operating system to operating strategies for Kubernetes, many facets will be covered. How independently can the various measures be implemented? How do they interact with each other? How will this impact performance? David and Marco will share their experience and give examples of what can be done and where to be careful.