Sponsored Keynote: Building a Sustainable, Carbon-Aware Cloud: Scale Workloads and Reduce Emissions

Conference: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023

2023-04-19

Authors: Jorge Palma

Summary

The presentation discusses the importance of building sustainable, carbon-aware cloud-native apps and reducing carbon emissions for k8s workloads using the CNCF open-source project KEDA.

Sustainability in the technology space requires reducing emissions while facing greater demand to build scalable applications
Green software principles include energy efficiency, hardware efficiency, and carbon awareness
Carbon intensity is the measure of the amount of carbon produced in order for the energy that we use to be created
The carbon-aware scalar for KEDA uses demand shaping to scale workloads based on the carbon intensity of the infrastructure where they're running
The carbon-aware scalar is implemented using a Kubernetes operator that reads infrastructure provider's data from a config map
The carbon-aware scalar is an open-source wrapper for public sources of data
The carbon-aware scalar allows users to define carbon emission thresholds and maximum replicas
The project is being developed for CADA core and users are encouraged to join the sustainability efforts
Join the CNCF sustainability tag and check the links for more information

The speaker explains that software runs the world and it takes a lot of electricity to run. Therefore, it is important to make software a part of the conversation about sustainability. The carbon-aware scalar for KEDA is a step towards building more sustainable, carbon-aware cloud-native apps and reducing carbon emissions for k8s workloads.

Abstract

When we think about sustainability in the technology space, we know that reducing emissions is essential, even as we face greater demand to build scalable applications. Choosing efficient hardware is only part of the answer. Let's look at carbon awareness from the perspective of building sustainable cloud-native apps.Using the CNCF open-source project KEDA and making it carbon-aware, we can leverage proactive scaling to reduce carbon emissions for k8s workloads - without requiring changes to your code or your workloads. We’ll look at relevant business scenarios and workload categories where innovating in this space helps us all build a more sustainable open-source future (while also helping manage energy costs).

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