Gaël DUEZ

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Gaël DUEZ
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#59 Debriefing Qcon Sustainability track with Erica Pisani

How is sustainability covered in main tech conferences"How is sustainability covered in main tech conferences?  Sure cybersecurity, DevOps, or anything related to SRE, is covered at length. Not to mention AI… But what room is left for the environmental impact of our job ? And what are the main trends which are filtered out from specialized conferences in Green IT such as Green IO, GreenTech Forum or eco-compute to generic Tech conferences?  To talk about it Gaël Duez sat down in this latest Green IO episode with Erica Pisani who was the MC of the Performance and Sustainability track at QCon London this year. Together they discussed:  The inspiring speakers in the track Why Qcon didn’t become AIcon How to get C-level buy-in by highlighting the new environmental rik The limit to efficiency: fine balancing between hardware stress and usage optimization Why performance and sustainability are tight in technology   Why assessing Edge computing’s positive and negative impact is tricky And much more! ❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode, twice a month, on Tuesday! 📧 Once a month, you get carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here.  📣 Green IO next Conference is in Munich on July 2nd and 3rd. Every Green IO listener can get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP. A small gift for your huge . 🎁  Learn more about our guest and connect:  Erica's LinkedIn  Erica’s Website Green IO website  Green IO Slack Gaël Duez's website  📧 You can also send us an email at @greenio.tech to share your and suggest future guests or topics.    Erica’s sources and other references mentioned in this episode QCon London's "Performance and Sustainability" track with a list of all the talks/speakers Building Green Software by Anne Currie, Sarah Hsu and Sara Bergman Previous Green IO episode with Ludi Akue Previous Green IO episode with Sara Hsu Green Software Foundation Wilco Burggraaf's page on GSF which has links to his writing Transcript (auto-generated) Erica Pisani (00:01)Think sustainable technology is inherently performant for the most part. And I think that those two things actually they're pretty well associated with each other. Gaël Duez (00:12)Hello everyone, welcome to Green IO! I'm Gael Duez and in this podcast, we empower responsible technologists to build a greener digital world, one bite at a time. Twice a month on a Tuesday, guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches, enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability. How is sustainably covered in main tech conferences? Sure, cybersecurity, DevOps and its DORA metrics or anything related to SRE is covered at length. Did I forget to mention AI? Not anymore. But what room is left for the environmental impact of our what are the main trends, which are filtered out from specialized conferences like Green IO or Ecocompute to non-specialized conferences, the big tech conferences. And to talk about it, I'm delighted today to have Erica Pisani with us. So Erica lives in Canada, Toronto, software engineer in a FinOps company. And when she doesn't work, she enjoys playing violin and working in the woods with her dog, which might give us hints on why she eventually managed to be the MC of the Performance and Sustainability track at QCon London this year. So I'm really glad to have you on the show Erica and that's going to be a great debrief that we're going to have. Erica Pisani (01:42)Yeah, thank you so much for having me here. I'm super excited to Green IO. Gael Duez (01:47)You're more than welcome. So, Erica, how did you end up being the MC of the Performance and Sustainability Track at QCon London this year? And please share with us the long version where you explain how you started to get interested in IT sustainably in the first place and is there any, I don't know, maple syrup involved? Yeah, I know it's terrible cliche. Go for it. Erica Pisani (02:07)No, no, I do love maple syrup. Unfortunately, it's not necessarily part of the story. But I guess the longer story is I originally, so the punchline, guess here is I came to sustainability in software development through edge computing. And really I started looking at edge computing because I just didn't know what the heck it was. A couple of years ago, every like cloud provider from, and I was working at Netlify at the time, every cloud provider from Netlify to Versal and Cloudflare and like AWS that were going on and on about compute power being available at the edge, data being available at the edge. My coworkers were so excited about edge functions launching and I straight up had no idea what they were talking about. And for me, the best way for me to learn stuff is to try and learn it as if I was gonna teach it, which is that age old advice. So to motivate myself to learn about Edge, I ended up deciding on a whim to pitch a lightning talk of I'm gonna talk about the Edge and I'm gonna talk about why it's important and exciting for software developers. No sustainability component in it whatsoever. It was just I wanted to learn more about it. And fortunately it got picked up because it was this huge thing. And I got extremely lucky that through the great vine of conferences, my talk got the attention of a member of the programming committee at QCon in 2023. so I go to QCon London and I can't what the track was at the time, but there was a sustainability track there at the time and Sarah Bergman was speaking. And I going to see her talk and I'm sitting there and I can't the name of the talk exactly, but she's, talking about the different scopes and the stuff that you see in the building green software book. And as I'm sitting watching her talk about this, I realized that the edge that I'd been focusing on for so long could actually play a part in the sustainability, sustainable tech movement. And so I ended up completely overhauling my talk because I was just like, just want to focus on learning more about sustainability in tech and how this can tie in and we can leverage it in this really amazing way. And I got so excited that like for me, felt like one of those turning points in how I view my career where I wanted to start looking through how I build software through that lens a lot more seriously. And because I was so excited about this, another programming committee member maybe about a year later because she kept hearing me talk about, and we kept in touch just because we met at the conference, got along. and she's like, so we have another like sustainable track that's going to be a QCon. And at that time I had been doing a few different conferences and was kind of tapped out. I was, I needed a break. So she's like, you don't have to do it this year, but consider it maybe for next year. And so, you know, 2025 Qcon London is about to roll around and she asked again like would you be interested and I was like I'm recovered I am ready to go let's do this and so that's how I ended up hosting the track this year. Gael Duez (05:26)Excellent. That's really, really cool to kickstart with something you don't know and having this approach like I want to teach about it to make sure that I understand about it, which is I must it a bit of my approach as well. Like I love ending up teaching pretty fast when I'm investigating a new field because that's the only way to actually put your brain is not always purely backed by science or research papers. So yeah, I got you on this one. Erica Pisani (06:00)Yeah, and I don't know about you, but for me, sometimes when I'm in a rush to solve a problem, I sometimes hand wave over things I don't understand and just keep going. And when you have when you force yourself to like, okay, someone's going to ask this question, you have to understand why it's behaving in this particular way. It's so much better in the long run, but it's definitely always tempting to skip when you're when you just want to get the shiny thing working. Gael Duez (06:14)Absolutely. Yeah. And it's especially true when you've got some momentum in the field, like in green IT or IT sustainability at the moment, where there are more and more. And that's the good news. There are more and more people getting involved, talking about it, posting about it. mean, my LinkedIn be read the entire, the eight hours nonstop with this sort of constant media production, we tend to forget about the longer form of thinking, which is reading a book or preparing a course. And that helps actually to structure much more the topics you're investigating rather than just, I've heard about him. I've heard about her. she read. She did something amazing. She said something amazing. But at the end, how do you connect all the dots is really missing. That's my feeling when I'm reading too much of my LinkedIn feed, which is, guess, the only social network that I'm still active in. Erica Pisani (07:12)Yeah, no, I understand. And even just like all the newsletters available out there too. It's very overwhelming. Gael Duez (07:16)Yeah, wow. Oops. And I play guilty for the green eye one, but it's a monthly only. It's a monthly only. I choose the rhythm for the reason. Erica Pisani (07:24)It's one of the few that's like gone through my, what's the word now, my frequent like just purges of my newsletter inbox. It's managed to stay the test of time. Gael Duez (07:32)Yeah. That's a good test. Erica, let's talk a bit about QCon this year in April it was. Were you also in charge of sourcing, finding the speakers? Erica Pisani (07:51)Yeah, I was asked to be a track host. So QCon London happened in end of March, beginning of April, and I had to start doing my like, my research and reaching out in September, October of 2024. so kind of had the themes, I could make of it what I would. And I was responsible for almost creating the story that I wanted to tell in the context of performance and sustainability through the speakers that I was selecting. There were some restrictions because budgetary reasons for conferences, like on geographies. And obviously, they're hosted in London. They want to see some folks that are based in that tech community. But otherwise, the conference was really great for track hosts like myself to find who we wanted and invite them in. Gael Duez (08:42)That's a pretty prestigious name. I guess when you reach out to someone, say, hey, would you consider talking to QCon and submitting a talk, usually the door doesn't slam on your face like, wow. Excellent. So that being said, what were the top trends you witnessed in green IT? within your Erica Pisani (08:53)I'm not gonna lie, it was very helpful to be able to say I was coming from CubeCon London. Gael Duez (09:11)Sustainability and performance track in QCon London, but also feel free to elaborate a bit on the bigger conference. It's just that I'm not 100 % sure that you had the time to actually enjoy the rest of the conference, so I don't want to push you out of your conference zone thinking, oh well, I read the program, but that's pretty much it. Erica Pisani (09:29)I know I honestly, I was very glad my track was the first day because after the first day I was zonked. I can't imagine doing two days of a conference and then having to host the track. I'll start with the general theme of, guess, the wider conference from what I was able to pick out. Obviously AI is the thing right now. A lot of people are talking about AI's impact on the tech world, on the wider world. There was... Gael Duez (09:34)Can you imagine? That's a different story. Erica Pisani (09:55)Someone who, if I correctly, was giving a keynote even just like on design and how design is kind of being impacted in positive and negative ways with AI. There was a significant number of talks that talked about AI and if it wasn't the main feature, it was at least touched on and referenced on how it was impacting the topic that was being discussed. But would say there was still a good variety of topics being spoken about at the conference. It wasn't so dominating that it was just like QCon have become an AI conference. was just it because it's playing such a large part in software right now and has been for a couple of years. is understandably taking a lot of space in people's minds and there's a lot of questions. And so there's a lot of speakers that are stepping to the plate to talk about how AI is affecting things in different ways. Gael Duez (10:28)Yeah, AI-con. Erica Pisani (10:47)In of the themes of the performance and sustainability track, one of the themes that I would say, so in of the talks that were selected, they covered different things in general. I want to kind of talk about how you advocate maybe for sustainability initiatives at a leadership level, because one of the common questions that would come up from audience is how do you get buy-in from the wider organization? There's a lot of software developers who listen about, yes, this does matter. We know it's important, but we still have to tell business leaders something to be able to take the time to experiment with gathering metrics, understanding what metrics do we need to gather. ⁓ As Sarah has mentioned before, I think in one of your recent episodes for Green IO, sometimes it's not entirely precise and that can be difficult to get buy-in for if it's not like you have a hundred percent certainty that these metrics are going to give you a clear picture of, let's say the carbon emissions of your software stack. And so one theme was like, okay, how do you get, how at it as an organization leader or organizational leader, how do you get buy-in from the wider organization and start adopting more sustainability practices so that you can move in the direction that you want to move? Obviously I had an AI feature there, so had someone come and talk about how to develop AI in more resource constrained environments. AI most of the time is talking about developing big LLMs with massive amounts of data. And obviously it's well known about AI's energy consumption. So I wanted to have someone be able to speak to how do you make AI performant in a smaller scale, which means that it's more sustainable. Gael Duez (12:15)Yeah. Was the speaker, Okay? Erica Pisani (12:30)Jade Abbott. So she is the CTO of Lolata AI and she's based out of South Africa and as she talks, I know the talk isn't quite, it's not live to the public yet, but she talks a little bit about how South Africa has unique constraints environment-wise. Like you can't depend on constant running electricity to be running these big, or training these large language models ⁓ for let's say like, you know, two weeks straight. So it was a really interesting talk to hear how to build those things. And then local first software is not just within a sustainability perspective, but in general, it's becoming more interesting across the board because it's a very performant way to build software. ⁓ And so that was something that we were able to highlight in this track. And obviously Sarah was on the talk and talking about, or on the track and was talking about metrics and how to gather that information. That's also a question people often have is how do information to be able to take action on it because you can't act on something that you can't measure and move toward a better outcome. Gael Duez (13:37)Did she talk about the observability versus good old metrics debate? Erica Pisani (13:42)Yes, yes she did. Yes, a little bit. She got like a lot of great stuff in the 40 minutes that she had. ⁓ And I'm actually excited when the recordings come out to rewatch it again because obviously there's so much information you take in a conference. Gael Duez (14:00)So you mentioned the buy-in being one of the main topic. What would be the two, three, four main insights that you've got from these different talks? So Sarah's talk, ⁓ who else was actually talking about the buy-in, the C-level buy-in? Erica Pisani (14:16)Ludi. And I wanted Ludi's, yeah, because she had experienced decarbonizing tech stacks ⁓ at one of her companies whose name I forget at the moment. Gael Duez (14:20)Ludi, yeah, obviously Ludi, yeah. Loomi My daughter's got one so that's pretty easy. It's a story box. Erica Pisani (14:33)Okay. Thank you. Hahahaha! Okay. That's really cool. So yeah, that was like probably the largest theme. And from there, it's like how to have more sustainable AI, how to develop more sustainable software. those were, think that like the big themes that came out of that track and that there were often a lot of questions about. Gael Duez (14:57)Okay. So now I'm going back to my previous questions. How can we get some buy-in? What were the main insights shared by Ludy and Sarah and some other speakers? Do you recall some vivid examples of things to do or not to do, actually? Erica Pisani (15:17)Well in, in Sarah's talk, she, and I, I realize it's, ⁓ it can, it can sometimes be a bit of a challenge to do this, but be okay with accepting the use of proxy metrics that are perhaps not perfect. And I think even to ask business leaders to do this is obviously a bit of a, is a bit of a challenge or like organizational leaders is a bit of a challenge, but even as a, speaking as a software engineer to have to take metrics that I know are not completely accurate is a bit challenging even for me to sit with. I think she made a very good point that it's better to have at least something that's somewhat approximate and close to what we want, and at least be able to somewhat measure it and improve it over time than to be completely blind as to what the state of the software stack is in of our sustainability initiatives, if we have them, or if we have certain concrete ones in the organization. And for getting buy-in, Gael Duez (16:01)And measure the evolution. Erica Pisani (16:14)Ludie, think really accurately summed it up or one of her great points anyway, was that it is a business risk ⁓ to just gloss this over. The weather is becoming increasingly unpredictable. Data centers are not necessarily going to be safe from these massive, seemingly once in a generation storms that seem to be coming every year. And taking that seriously now, even starting to get in the mindset of we need to think about this. I think it's only a matter of time and I think there's some, can't necessarily quote the specific regulations and stuff like that, but governments are starting to make it a regulatory thing. so regulatory considerations are something every business pays attention to anyway. So if you're getting on the right foot now, it makes it far less painful in the future because this this is going to come. Gael Duez (17:06)Interesting this resiliency approach because it goes so much against our culture in the tech space at the moment which is like you know there is no limit sky is a limit which is actually true sky is limited it's called the greenhouse gas emissions in the sky is the the blood limit but that's a different yeah but that's a different that's a different issue Erica Pisani (17:21)The literal limit, Gael Duez (17:31)I think it's good that we have these talks and people speaking up on these and maybe rebounding on what happens around us. Like what happened in Spain and Portugal should be a wake-up call to pretty much everyone running a 24-7 infrastructure because suddenly you can have no electricity. For the moment, backup generator are available for everyone, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, But hey, for how long and what is the cost actually to running all of this? Erica Pisani (18:00)Yeah, and at least closer to home for me, we had some terrible wildfires over the past number of years. Wildfire season starts increasingly earlier and earlier every year. ⁓ And I think probably the most memorable thing that happened with that wildfire season was a few years ago when the smoke from the wildfires in Canada were blanketing New York, and it seemed like an eerie Mars-like situation. ⁓ Gael Duez (18:00)It makes a lot of sense. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that was crazy. And not so fun fact, I use in quite a lot of my public talks now, the white fire in Canada to get some proportion from people and I'll ask them what is the size of the country that is equivalent to the burnt area from these white fires? And people that don't imagine, proper answer is Nepal. then when you put it like, you know, the Nepal map on the average European country or the average even US state, it's pretty big. Suddenly, you're like, oh my god, this is insane. But the problem is it's often pushed back as some ecological concern, And the connection with our tech world is not made that much. This is why all this water stress, for data centers, or energy stress becomes that much important. And you mentioned another trend that you nurtured in your track, was efficiency, software efficiency, running software with less energy. I guess Holly Commons talked about cloud zombies, were there other insights also? And what did she mention also? Erica Pisani (19:30)Yeah. So obviously the zombie server thing is a good one. ⁓ Another one being that if I think that I'm gonna be paraphrasing here, but like efficiency is there's a limit to efficiency. There is a limit to how, and I think this is even worth noting in the sustainability context because we may take the idea that we may need to run fewer servers at a much higher degree of like utilization to help ensure that we reduce the amount of carbon emissions that we have. And there's a fine balance there where if you were to run servers maybe at too high of an efficiency, and the example that Holly had given was that of like a combustion engine, a car. There's a theoretical maximum efficiency that it has, but it's designed to run at far lower than that threshold because you don't want to wear the engine out. And similarly, that's something that we have to consider when we're trying to like resource capacity plan where we want to make sure we have enough servers to handle the amount of traffic, not as low as like, what was the quote that maybe like 12 to 18 percent of the capacity of a server's use that's obviously way too low. But we can't necessarily be at 90 to 100 percent because now we might be running the risk that our carbon emissions are related to the embodied carbon cost of having to replace our hardware frequently. And she also tied it back really well to just even like humans working way too hard all the time and needing to still take time to rest. And I think that's something that is important in a world like ours where we are trying to build more sustainable software in a world that is increasingly getting hotter. And it can sometimes feel like we need to work. at 100 % all the time to get closer to that. But I Holly's talk in that it also reminds you to rest a little bit, take care of yourself because you can't be running at 100 % all the time. Gael Duez (21:20)Do we need all of this? And all of this that far and that fast. That's super interesting what you've mentioned because it connects with two dots. first of all, what Holy Mansion is really literally backed by science and researches such as I know that I'm quoting him a lot, but Erica Pisani (21:35)Yes. Gael Duez (21:52)Professor PS Lee in Singapore was like this big expert on water cooling and really study the impact on hardware of how you manage a data center in tropical area. He has provided me tons of and that was one of his . The hardware, it has some sort of a sweet spot for running operations. And even if it's not like the max capacity, sold by the hardware providers, actually, above a certain threshold, you're really as you say, you're significantly decreasing its lifespan. So obviously, increasing the emission via the embodied carbon, because you will have to replace sooner the gear. And so that was really connecting in my mind when you mentioned it. Erica Pisani (22:39)Yeah. Gael Duez (22:41)And it also connected to something else that we should be cautious about all this talk about how much energy we waste or how much server capacity we waste. know, in Green IO Singapore this year, we had this talk from, this AWS software engineer. He was showing this graph of how unused capacities on average you could find on a standard AWS server, And I think we should be very cautious about this theoretical number and it might be proven way lower in true operational condition. And back to the track itself, about? Erica Pisani (23:27)One of the, I think, things that was really exciting about the, like, just hosting the track too, is seeing, there seemed to be like this effect where as more people came to the different talks and people started hearing about the different topics that were in the track, there was increasingly higher amounts of people coming to the track as the day went on. And it seemed like a lot of folks... Gael Duez (23:41)Okay. Erica Pisani (23:53)We're really excited and really engaged. And I think that that's really encouraging to see that when folks are aware of the sustainability stuff that we can work on in tech that we have available to us, it seems like it's more we know what we want, we need to do, and we have some ideas of what we can do, and it's just a matter of executing on it. People are really excited to take that back to their organizations and start adopting it themselves. I know sometimes you see some talks where folks just don't know what to ask, but that's not what I saw at QCon. Everyone was super keen, which I love to see, and that made me really excited for my speakers as well, because I'm glad that they got to see just how excited people were about sustainable tech. Gael Duez (24:44)and having a lot of questions is always a very good sign for a speaker, that's for sure. And actually, it connects with a question I wanted to ask you, all this momentum and people showing up more and more over the day, because I was wondering, why did you choose to name your track Sustainably and Performance? And was it the only angle performance to attract devs attention? Was it like if you had mentioned only sustainly or green IT, was it not enough? What is your explanations for this choice? Erica Pisani (25:21)well, I have to it, I didn't get to necessarily call the track that like it came in as performance and sustainability. I can make some tweaks to it, but for the most part, it was like, we have this idea that we would like this track to be this. do you feel comfortable playing together a track for this? And I think though, that it was well named because I think. Gael Duez (25:25)Okay. Okay. Erica Pisani (25:43)Like performance is something that a lot of software developers usually, that's often the stuff that they're running into in their day-to-day works and something that's very front of mind. They're dealing with like too slow of an application in this respect or ⁓ this database isn't responding well in this capacity. And so they're looking for solutions and ideas on how they can tackle the performance challenges that they maybe have and their organization, or they're anticipating that there will be challenges and want to know ahead of time. That being said, think sustainable technology is inherently performant for the most part. And I think that those two things actually they're pretty well associated with each other. And I thought I'd like, as I was building the track that angle I thought was very important to me because you the best of both worlds in this sense. You can look to build performance software and by looking to build performance software, you can work toward creating a more sustainable future with the tech that you're building. And I didn't want it to seem like you had to pick either or. There is a lot of opportunities for both. was also why I really doubled down on that title for the track. Gael Duez (26:56)Yeah, makes sense. Anyway, if this is a wording that would attract people, I think you made a really good choice to use it to make sure that your room is full and then they got exposed to great content. If the room is empty, mean, that's pointless to have like the most technical possible talk on sustainability in scope one and two and three and four and what not. I got your point. Erica Pisani (27:18)Yeah, but it is good even just to have a, almost like if you can envision the software that you ultimately have at the end of the day that happens to be sustainable and ultimately I want to see a sustainable future and so it's a little bit like I'm pulling that messaging in a bit. I think it makes it more real for people. It doesn't feel like an abstract theory. Gael Duez (27:26)I completely got it. I've got a question. I'm always curious about what is mentioned when people are talking about sustainability and planetary boundaries and the likes. Was it like mostly about carbon and energy or where other environmental impacts such as water, resource exhaustion, et cetera, et cetera, also mentioned? Erica Pisani (28:02)⁓ Water resources and stuff like that was mentioned in the talks themselves. Holly both called that out specifically in their talks. For the folks that were on the other side, the attendees, they tended to think more in of the energy. Gael Duez (28:09)Okay. Erica Pisani (28:18)Not to say that they weren't thinking also about the water usage and stuff like that, but I think usually when folks were asking questions, it was more like, want to reduce the energy consumption of my data center to reduce my emissions more than it's consuming X liters of water every day. Gael Duez (28:34)Which makes sense because this is their main proxy metrics to act like on day one. If you decide to migrate your cloud or even to do like carbon aware computing, it requires the DevOps and the Ops and sometimes the Sys to be put in the loop and it's a longer game and QoCon being really focused on Dev and DevOps, starting with energy makes a lot of what you shared is very positive news because I that three years ago in main tech conference just talking about energy savings was really a Revolution and now if it goes beyond and some talks mention also water That's a very positive sign. Okay Erica Pisani (29:16)Yeah, and even those metrics, like we're getting better at tracking them, but Ludie called out in her talk, like it can be difficult to get really concrete measurements sometimes on that alone. And so if we're looking to gather more information on, let's say, water usage, that's going to be something that we'll have to advocate for with our cloud providers to start giving us more information in that respect as well. Gael Duez (29:23)Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. makes lot of sense. Okay, so Erica, thanks a lot for the wrap-up of this five talks at QCon London. Can I ask you one last, maybe two last questions? What's next for you in the Sustainably Area, of course? Erica Pisani (29:48)Of course. There's a few different things I'd like to look at on the side for myself. I've had a few different ideas kicking in my head, partially inspired by some of the talks I'd seen at QCon and just from following other folks in the field. One of them being because I, in my role right now at the financial tech company, we use Django, which is like a framework that's been around for ages. And I can't who the person was on Blue Sky that kind of gave me this friendly nudge, but there was this whole discussion happening in a Django forum of people trying to figure out how to best measure like carbon emissions or energy usage of Django apps. And there wasn't necessarily some good consensus on it. And so that's something that I'm hoping to take a look at at some point with what free time I have. ⁓ And then otherwise I'm still just trying to learn from everyone else right now. And what I am learning and at least having some ideas about it and blogging about. So that's kind of what's next for me right now. Gael Duez (30:41)Okay, interesting sense. And you mentioned resources and stuff that you've learned. Would you like to share with the audience your main sources of information, except for QCon London, obviously, this year? Erica Pisani (31:11)Yeah, I really like following the folks at the Green Software Foundation. Sometimes I'll take a look at, they have working groups that are looking at like developing papers on let's say recently, I think they did a working group on AI and I'm just interested in seeing what they're thinking of in of developing more sustainable AI. I also like following, I don't know his last name, but his first name is Wilco and he's very active in. Yes. So he's someone that I follow and just like pay attention to as well as, yeah, and Sasha Luciani, even though I don't work in AI, I still love listening to, or not necessarily listening to, but what she writes, I tend to read as well. And then I listen to Green IO, which is also how I've been getting some of my information. Gael Duez (31:43)He's amazing. Yeah, thanks a lot. Okay, thanks a lot for this. And maybe to close the podcast on our usual positive piece of news, would you like to share something? I know that you're based in North America, so it's not that easy at the moment, but would you like to share a positive piece of news regarding sustainability or life in general? I don't know. ⁓ Erica Pisani (32:12)Yeah, sure. Like I mentioned before, I got like really interested in edge computing. I like I've gone deep down that rival hole of understanding more about how people are investing it and how it's growing over the years. And I think something that's got me really excited, and that makes me like, I consider a wonderful piece of good news is that as more distributed computing, obviously distributed computing is a thing already, but as it gets more adopted in an edge computing sense, there's really cool opportunities for things like smaller edge data centers incorporated into maybe urban environments where the data centers can heat buildings. And by being able to be used in that way, we can actually significantly reduce carbon emissions of heating buildings, which is a major, major source of carbon emissions. And that, I don't know why I'm nerding out so much about that, but I think that's an amazing piece of news, especially being in a colder climate like Canada. Gael Duez (33:13)Yeah, I was about to say that in tropical area, that's kind of the opposite. what do you do with this extra heat? And, know, to bounce back on what you said, this edge computing and this CDN stuff and all of the likes is really something that I'm trying to investigate more and more because on one hand, yes, it can be the case at having, you know, less network to travel through, we can reduce somehow not the immediate environmental footprint of data because it has almost zero elasticity, but the would say midterm long term sizing of the overall network. it makes sense like to have computing capacity closer to the end . But on the other end, if you look at how the world is decarbonizing, there are huge gaps. And I'm always wondering, if I'm going to try to take a North American example, but if I've got s based in Ohio, do I really want to do edge computing in Ohio far as I , the grid is pretty dirty there. Rather than hosting most of my server capacity in Quebec, where I think it's one of the lowest carbon electricity grid in North America. this trade-off, I think I've never seen any article, any research paper truly embracing it and trying to tackle it. So correct me if I'm wrong. And if any listener had some research paper, please send them my way. But yeah, that's a real challenge for me. And I'm curious to hear what you have to say because you're the edge expert. like, you know, talking about it, but I've got an expert. So I'm going to ask the question to the experts. Erica Pisani (35:09)No, don't worry. So the question is more like how to balance like having edge data centers, let's say in dirtier grids compared to just hosting in. Yeah, no, that's a very good question. And I think I would also be very interested in this research paper should it exist. I think that is one of those things that it's gonna be one of those. Gael Duez (35:22)Hahaha Erica Pisani (35:32)Design architectural decisions because to your point, if I'm in North America and I, you know, being based in Toronto, I have this wonderful data center that is one of the greenest in the grid, not that like a four hour drive away from me. I would rather use that data center and test whether hosting stuff at the edge in Toronto makes from the reduction in the distance traveled of the request, does that make a meaningful difference to host that stuff here where we may need to be burning in the middle of winter fossil fuels to be able to supply the electricity grid? Or is it better to just rely entirely on the data center? I don't have necessarily a good concrete answer for that, but I think that there would, I would love to see there be tests done on that because depending on, I guess, the fossil fuel that's being used in that particular grid, there can be a very meaningful difference to hosting everything on the data center, not leveraging the edge, versus leveraging the edge heavily and getting the reduction in emissions from not having the request travel as far. Gael Duez (36:41)Agree. If you ever want to resume your studies and do a PhD, you've got a research topic. But anyway, well, thanks a lot, Erica. That was cool to do this wrap up episode about QCon. I wonder if the listeners will enjoy it as well. So please feel free to comment. Erica Pisani (36:49)Yeah, I have lots of material now.  Gael Duez (37:06)Because if so, we will do more. are other great tech conferences also that are focusing more and more on sustainability, but it was also great meeting you. I was not aware of how involved you were in the field, so I'm very glad that we connected now. So thanks a lot for ing the show. Erica Pisani (37:21)Thank you again so much for having me. This was a blast. Gael Duez (37:25)Low carbon blast. Talk to you soon, Erica. Erica Pisani (37:27)Low carbon blast, yes, always. You too, take care. Gaël Duez (37:39)Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode. Because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO, all the references mentioned in this episode, as well as the full transcript, are in the show notes. You can find these notes on your favorite podcast platform and of course on our website greenio.tech. Now, if you enjoy this interview, please take 30 seconds to give us five stars on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Sharing this episode on social media or directly with fellow software practitioners seems also a good idea, if they couldn't attend QCon this year. You got the point, being an independent media, we rely mostly on you to get more responsible technologists on board. In our next episode, we will welcome Rainer Karcher, a pillar of the SustainableIT.org association and a climate activist in a suit, as he likes to describe himself. We will talk about the importance of not deprioritizing future readiness, which is what is the current backlash against ESG doing, and what IT and digital has to do with it. Stay tuned. By the way, Green IO is a podcast and much more. So visit greenio.tech to subscribe to our free monthly newsletter, read the latest articles on our blog and check the conferences we organize across the globe. New York was a blast last month and the next one is in Munich on July 2nd and 3rd. As a Green IO listener, you can get a free ticket to any Green IO conferences using the voucher GREENIOVIP Just make sure to have one before the 30 free tickets per conference are all gone. I'm looking forward to meeting you there to help you, fellow responsible technologists, build a greener digital world. ❤️ Never miss an episode! Hit the subscribe button on the player above and follow us the way you like.  📧 Our Green IO monthly newsletter is also a good way to be notified, as well as getting carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents. " data-title="Descripción:" title="Descripción">

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#58b Avoided emissions thanks to Tech: the Vinted use case with Laetitia Bornes - Part 2

Why is the model of a Nobel prize winner not necessarily good science? What is “good” modelling?...

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#58 Avoided emissions thanks to Tech: the Vinted use case with Laetitia Bornes

Can a digital company be “carbon negative”? What should we think of these claims of “tons of...

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#57 Greening Intelligence: Bridging Infrastructure and Governance for a Sustainable AI Future with Pr. PS Lee and Pr. He

Description “It's always a case of fit for purpose, or what we call a proper engineering.” Some...

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#56 Building Green Software, the one year anniversary with Sarah Hsu

A year ago, Building Green Software was released by O’Reilly. Since Tim Frick’s book “Deg...

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#55 Decarbonizing Kubernetes with Flavia Paganelli and Niki Manoledaki

Did containerisation ship away our environmental responsibility"Did containerisation ship away our environmental responsibility?  Containers come with the promise of automation, scalability and reliability. The question is how to add sustainability to the list without breaking its other benefits. To talk about these challenges, Gaël Duez welcomes Flavia Paganelli and Niki Manoledaki, 2 experts in Kubernetes who are also pillars of the CNCF TAG Environmental Sustainability workgroup.  This episode might beat the record of acronyms: KEIT, CNCF, TAG … And yet Flavia Paganelli and Niki Manoledaki provided crystal clear explanations when they covered:    🍳 Why Kubernetes is a lot like a restaurant,    ⛈️ The challenges with sustainability in cloud computing,    🛠️ The CNCF KEIT project,    🌱 CNCF’s reorg and what might happen to the TAG Environmental Sustainability,    💪 The power of open source communities, And much more! ❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode, twice a month, on Tuesday! 📧 Once a month, you get carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here.  📣 Green IO Singapore is on April 6th and our next stop is in New York on May 15th. Every Green IO listener can get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP. A small gift for your huge . 🎁  Learn more about our guests and connect  Flavia’s LinkedIn Niki’s LinkedIn Green IO website  Green IO Slack Gaël Duez's website  📧 You can also send us an email at @greenio.tech to share your and suggest future guests or topics.    Flavia and Niki's sources and other references mentioned in this episode: FOSDEM 2025 talk: Kubernetes Emissions Insights: Turning Cloud-Native Green (Without Recycling Pods) KubeCon 2024 talk: Debunking Myths About Environmental Sustainability in the Cloud, Building a Greener CNCF Landscape CNCF TAG Environmental Sustainability CNCF Kepler project CNCF Prometheus CNCF Falco Software Carbon Intensity standard Boavizta API Aknostic GrafanaLabs Transcript (auto-generated) Flavia (00:00)I got to meet Nikki and all the people at the CNCF and I had the opportunity to go to KubeCon in Paris last year, it was amazing because it's not just about the who and the what, but it's about the people. So the energy that came out of that group, I like, want to be part of this. I want to, you know, forces to build something together Gaël Duez (00:16)Hello everyone, welcome to Green IO. I'm Gaël Duez and in this podcast, we empower responsible technologists to build a greener digital world, one bite at a time. Twice a month on a Tuesday, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability. And because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO. All the references mentioned in this episode as well as the full transcript are in the show notes You can find these notes on your favorite podcast platform and of course on our website greenio.tech. Cloud computing is nothing but material. It is just someone else's computer, as a popular quote says. Yet, using cloud services comes with its specific challenges for whoever is willing to seriously monitor its environmental footprint. And with the rapid adoption of cloud-based solutions, came extra layers of abstraction and remoteness with the bare-metal servers which ultimately compute and store the data. One of these extra layers is the use of containers in the orchestration system. And they have been massively adopted in software engineering and cloud operation, the so-called DevOps. The software containers market is now a multi-billion US dollar industry with a double digit gross rate. Containers come with the promise of automation, scalability, and reliability. Flavia (01:41)Thank you. Gaël Duez (02:08)The question is how to add sustainability to the list without breaking its other benefits. To talk about these challenges, I'm glad to have two experts in Kubernetes, by far the most used container orchestration solution in the world. Gaël Duez (02:24)Flavia and Niki who will be at CubeCon 2025 in London next week. Gaël Duez (02:32)Flavia is CTO at Agnostic and a tech lead in the CNCF TAG Sustainability Screen Reviews Working Group. She has decades of experience in software engineering, and in her early days, she co-authored several O'Reilly books on AWS and also built an IoT platform She is originally from Argentina and now lives in Utrecht, Netherlands. Niki Manoledaki is a senior software engineer at Grafana Labs, where she's part of the platform engineering team but she is also an environmental sustainability advocate, keynote speaker and a community facilitator, starting with co-chairing the CNCF Environmental Sustainability Tags Green Reviews Working Group. She's based in Barcelona, Spain. And fun fact, reflecting the 2024 year for the Green IO Podcast, I was concerned by the lack of Spanish speaking guests in the lineup. And I've realized that in 2025, there are a majority so far. So I do hope that all this episode will help spark meaningful conversations, both in Spain and in Latin America. And at some point I will have to consider hosting a GreenOil conference in Barcelona, Or maybe in Amsterdam first. Niki (03:48)Barcelona is a great place to host conferences. We do have the Mobile World Congress already happening. Actually, it's happening soon. Gaël Duez (03:57)I also happens in... Flavia (03:57)It would be nice when there's a train that goes from here to Barcelona, but they're still in progress. Gaël Duez (04:05)I know. At least Paris is well connected by train, both from Barcelona, the Netherlands, UK, etc. So at least for Green IO Paris, it will be easy to by train. That being said, hello, both of you. Niki (04:19)Hello. Flavia (04:19)Thank you for inviting us. Niki (04:21)Yes, it's great to be talking with you both today. Gaël Duez (04:23)Yeah, that's going to be a very interesting episode. And my first question might sound a bit dumb, but could you explain Kubernetes to our non-ops audience for a start? Flavia (04:37)There's maybe an analogy that I read once and I thought it's pretty clear. If you think about a very busy restaurant where you have a lot of guests and you need to make a lot of food and you need to organize this so everything comes out. So there's enough food for everyone at the right time. can think about Kubernetes in that way. Kubernetes is the chef organizing all the cooks. You have maybe the containers can be thought of as the individual chefs. And each individual chef has to be in charge of making one specific dish. And then you have the nods, which are the kitchen stations for different purposes, like a kitchen station for grilling, another for baking, another for chopping. And then the pods are like a team of cooks working on one single order. like in Kubernetes, you need to handle load or scaling properly, right? You need to make sure that the orders go to the right people so that they don't get overloaded. You need to put more cooks on a specific dish which is more popular, et cetera. If one group of cooks have a problem with something, then there's always. Yeah, the authority and the organization to fix that. So concepts like scalability, reliability, you want your meal to get to the table and on time. Those are maybe nicely included in this metaphor. Niki (06:34)And just for listeners who may be less familiar with the cloud, we're talking about hundreds of servers. So hundreds of computers and, how do you get the dish, which is the, application that a is trying to, to access, available for hundreds if not thousands of s. So we need to make sure that this application is available on every server. And that's what Kubernetes does is it orchestrates that all of these dishes are available at all of the tables. So all of the applications are all of the servers for everyone to be able to enjoy them. Gaël Duez (07:16)Got it. And now that you've mentioned all these servers, let's go to our main topic, which is what are, according to you, the top sustainably challenged running containers and maybe more specifically Kubernetes. Niki (07:32)So monitoring and auto scaling is what I would say the two branches of sustainability in Kubernetes. So we need to make sure we run everything as efficiently as possible. So we need to make sure resources are allocated in the most efficient way. So to do that, we need to be able to observe these resources how much U, how much memory, energy, and various other things. And then on the auto scaling side, we need to ensure that we are not deploying more than what you need. So everything needs to be basically packed together as tightly as possible so that we don't have idle resources just laying around and not being used. Flavia (08:23)So that's a really good document. And I hope that these resources translate around what you are being used. Gaël Duez (08:30)And is it the case today? Because I've seen some numbers in non-scientific studies, so I won't quote them here, but saying that in general, we are facing a massive over-provisioning of resources due to auto-scaling and all of this, is it true or is it a urban legend according to your experiences? Flavia (08:51)Yeah, it is very true. Last time I was at FOSDEM giving this talk and I asked people, did it ever happen to you that you found servers that were running that were not they didn't let me finish my sentence. Everybody was like, yeah. So, I mean, yes, this is, this is a very common problem. And I think it roots from the fact that, ever since we started using cloud, we can spin anything, anytime very easily without realizing the consequences immediately in of, yeah, not only price, but impact the environment Gaël Duez (09:36)And this tendency to overuse them, how can we fight back, especially from a sustainability angle? I know that both of you, you've been working on a project named KEIT which, the goal to automate the monitoring of the energy consumption, but maybe it goes beyond and it goes all the way to carbon estimates. So you will correct me if I'm wrong Flavia (10:02)So with KEIT, we are basically showing in what way your software and infrastructure and hardware cause an impact and what is source of this impact. Basically we use the software carbon intensity formula which is an ISO standard it considers three aspects. It considers the energy consumed by the software. It considers the carbon intensity of the energy used and the emissions of the hardware. in a way, you can see with the software carbon intensity, you can see where you have the most potential to improve. Or at least you can, you can observe it. can make changes and then you can improve. You can see as well which part of your software is, is generating most emissions. For example, looking at different namespace, looking at how many nods you have, et cetera. Gaël Duez (11:06)OK, got it. And my question is, where does this number come from? Niki (11:11)From the past two, three years while I've been building the CNCF environment sustainability TAG I've worked on the open source technologies that underlie the KEIT project. So I haven't worked on the KEIT project directly large part of what it's based on is open source tools that I've been maintaining or helping to build. And that includes, for example, Kepler, is an energy monitoring tool within Kubernetes. that is a tool that we could get very technical. Like really, some of the measurements from the kernel of the server. We basically, through Kepler, we're able how much energy is being consumed on the server and what is it linked to? which application is emitting or consuming this energy, which is measured in millijoules. So that's one of the components of the software carbon intensity specification to the same of that we have. Gaël Duez (12:26)Niki, just to clarify, I've got a bunch of questions regarding KEIT. The first one being, when you extract the energy consumption from the kernel, is it a measurement or is it an assessment via some sort of a low-level model? Flavia (12:45)You have both options because either have the, I don't know what it stands for, but the RAPL Niki (12:53)Running average power limit. Flavia (12:54)Okay, yeah, so component in the chip which lets you measure the energy consumption of the hardware or if not the nice thing of Kepler is that there are models to estimate them if you don't have a chip with the RAPL. But yeah, in general, course, everything is an estimation. even this RAPLE measurement. It measures only, I believe, the U but not everything else around it. So we do have to accept as engineers, even if we don't like it, that everything is an estimation and just work from there. It's better to have estimations than to have nothing. Niki (13:41)Yeah, it's a model, right? So everything is a model. Some models are more useful than others. there are so many different ways to measure energy consumption. But then there's embodied carbon and the energy that went into building the physical components of the server, for example. But as Flavia mentioned also, we do have gaps there are gaps such as networking. like gateways and other networking components are notoriously hard to measure. I know there's different communities, like different open source communities, and there's conversations amongst us, but still networking is something a lot of people are working on and that is really difficult to measure. Gaël Duez (14:34)So, if I understood right how KEIT works, you've got this energy consumption, either via RAPL or via other estimated model, that you translate into carbon emissions. Maybe this is the missing point. I guess you're using solutions like Electricity Maps or WattTime. Am I correct to assume this? Flavia (14:56)Yes, exactly. Gaël Duez (14:58)Okay, and then you add on top of it the embedded carbon from the servers, but you could not really include all the networking part. Is it correct summarize what you've said before like this? Flavia (15:11)Yes, yes, I think so. So it's those three sides of it and their limitations, I would say, almost in all three parts of the formula, because for the embodied emissions, for example, it's very difficult to get information, already difficult to get embodied emissions, but they are usually incomplete because there's not information about the disposal or the recycling of it. It's not disclosed by data centers or by cloud providers, or they don't say how many years the hardware is being used because that also has an impact on the embodied emissions. Gaël Duez (15:54)And do you use the data from the manufacturers or do you have other sources of data? Flavia (15:59)We use Boavizta, which is from a French, non-profit. so they have a whole database of the different hardware. so they have an API. You can say, I have this. I don't know, instance type. Tell me what are the embodied emissions. in KEIT we do that dynamically because the instance types can change to include this in the formula and calculate the SCI score. Gaël Duez (16:33)Thanks for the clarification. And do you have any success stories to share yet about how KEIT has been used in some organization or within some teams? Flavia (16:44)Well, I do have to say it's at the very beginning, project, but We are the moment working with one client, which is the Consumers Association, a non-profit in the Netherlands. so we installed it because basically you have your cluster, can deploy pretty easily and then you have an overview of your score. But we also added this widget to show the number of nods that you're running. And then we immediately saw like, okay, we're running too many nods in an environment which is just for development. So we are now working on improving that on setting up carpenter consolidation to make sure that only the necessary nods are being used at a certain time that's a very, for me, very nice example where it's helping. Niki (17:43)And at Grafana Labs also we're deploying Kepler at scale. It's quite challenging because Kepler for example, we mentioned, which is one of the components in the SCI and it relies on certain information that it should be able to fetch from the kernel but in the public cloud such as AWS, example, or GDP or Azure, this information may not be accessible. So there's certain other estimate methods that it needs to use. So all this to say that running this energy and carbon estimation models at scale is very difficult. And from my side at Grafana Labs, We are trying to run this at scale and kind of find which issues we come across and how can we deploy it in a production environment with as little issues as possible. So all of this is still a work in progress, but it's really great that we can come together in the open source community and kind of exchange this knowledge. Gaël Duez (18:56)For the clarification that this project is still an early stage project. People interested in this specific project, they can you at TAG sustainability group. And actually that leads me to a question I wanted to ask in the beginning of this interview could you help us maybe make some sense of the true alphabet soups around CNCF What is CNCF? What is TAG? What is the Green Reviews work group, for instance? Niki (19:26)So the CNCF stands for the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. it's a project actually of the Linux Foundation, which is a nonprofit organization that hosts a lot of open source projects. And the CNCF was created, I think in 2015, to host Kubernetes when it was Flavia (19:41)I think 2015 took host Cabrera's when the organization was initially created by the... Niki (19:49)Initially created by Google and then was donated to the Linux Foundation and the Linux Foundation created the CNCF to host it. And then other projects were hosted also by the CNCF such as Prometheus, which is a monitoring, well, a time series database for monitoring metrics. And then other projects ed and now there's, I don't know, like maybe dozens if not hundreds of sandbox projects. I'm not really sure on the number. But Kepler, which we talked about previously, is one of these sandbox projects that was donated by Red Hat and Intel the CNCF. So then with different subjects around this tool such as security, there was the creation of are technical advisory groups. And one of these tags that was created two years ago is the environmental sustainability TAG. And in this TAG, we promote and advocate for tools and use cases around cloud native sustainability, including Kepler, for example, and KEIT and other things like the SCI, the software carbon intensity specification. We talk about this at KubeCon, one of the biggest conferences that is related to the CNCF and FOSDEM as well. There have been talks about this cloud native sustainability tooling. And finally, we come to about a year and a half ago, we wanted to have a technical project where we can really get into the nitty gritty of how do you deploy Kepler? How do you link carbon emissions metrics such as WattTime and Electricity Maps, how do you get the embodied metrics from Boavizta and how do you calculate the rates of the software carbon intensity of tools and we created the green reviews working group. The idea for that is create reports or we report on the sustainability metrics such as energy use and carbon intensity and other more traditional metrics such as U usage and memory usage. we've been doing that with Falco, which is a tool. It's a security tool, a project hosted by the CNCF to work with the students and care for the students. And other things so we've been basically trying and innovating and just new ideas come, new people come to contribute their ideas, they want to try something, and we have this space to make it happen. And KEIT is kind of emerged from this work, I think. Flavia, maybe you can tell us more. yeah. Flavia (22:53)Well, we had this idea of making, we initially called it a sustainability plugin. So trying to reflect in a Kubernetes environment, the environmental impact of the infrastructure and software. And we a lot of ideas on things that we wanted to see there, only I thought it was pretty complicated. So I thought, how do we do this? And then I started looking around what's out there then I found the CNCF environmental sustainability TAG and I ed I saw this green reviews project and the software that was being worked on. I thought this is at least very good reflection of what we want to build. But for generic Kubernetes clusters. So I learned about the SCI and deploy actually maybe these things, because they are not so concrete, you don't see the power in it. But when I got to meet Nikki and all the people at the CNCF and I had the opportunity to go to KubeCon in Paris last year. It was amazing because it's not just about the who and the what, but it's about the people. So the energy that came out of that group, I like, want to be part of this. I want to, you know, forces to build something together. Gaël Duez (24:15)Actually, it's an interesting mention that you've done because I wanted to ask both of you a bit more about how it is to run source projects and to have this open source community working together, especially for, I would say, greater good project. Just before we jump on this of questions, to understand clearly what the Green Reviews Working Group is. I understood well, it's a bit of a permanent brainstorming work group on everything related to sustainability within the CNCF space. Or does it also has, I don't know, sub-team fully dedicated to maintain or code or create new products. I'm having a hard time understanding the connection between this work group and the tools that you've mentioned before, such as Kepler or KEIT. Niki (25:20)So the environmental sustainability TAG is kind of the broader brainstorming group. In the Green Reviews working group, we are creating a benchmarking pipeline. So we are doing benchmarking tests for cloud native tools such as Falco. Niki (25:40)to measure the softer carbon intensity rates. it's very similar to KEIT essentially, and we run benchmarking tests measure the different factors of the software carbon intensity specification. So that's the runtime energy, the emissions impact, the embodied carbon, and all of this using a unit of work, so like a rate. So yeah, the idea was, to take the software carbon intensity ISO specification when it became public last year, and to create an example using cloud native tooling to show how it can be done in Kubernetes. Gaël Duez (26:20)Okay. And one last logistic question. If people want to you, do their organization needs to ? Can it be done on a voluntary individual basis? Do they need to fill a form or how does it work concretely? Niki (26:38)It's fully open source, so everything is completely out in the open. a Slack organization for the CNCF. And if folks Google CNCF community invitation, they will get a portal to where they can put their email address and get an invitation to the CNCF Slack. I know that a lot of organizations the CNCF, but we don't require that in the TAG or in the working group. So anyone can the meetings. The meetings are twice a month. And we do a lot of planning during those meetings. And we talk about the different pull requests that people are working on or that need to be reviewed. then we triage some of the issues And we do have like a agile workflow. So anyone is welcome to . And then we have our GitHub repo where people can see issues that are open and that are beginner friendly. And we have the issues board where people can see which ones are next and ready to be picked up if they want to contribute. So people often will for a bit, maybe pick up an issue, contribute a way, learn. And then maybe they'll stay for more long term or some people come for a bit just to like learn. So just like any other open source project, really we're looking for contributors and long-term maintainers and we're open to everybody. Gaël Duez (28:22)Talking about open source projects and Flavia mentioned it a bit earlier. FOSDEM celebrated its 25th anniversary this year. Shall we say that everything is doing well for the open source community and maybe more specifically for the projects related to sustainability? Or are there some challenges that we don't necessarily see beyond the success? Flavia (28:46)Yeah, there's always challenges. especially that people find time to work on it. Because is an area where people get attracted to it because they want to do something good. They want to have a purpose. So you do find a lot of people wanting to the environmental sustainability TAG or help in the green reviews project. But it's hard to find people who have the time or who are ready to spend some time on it. Gaël Duez (29:23)Flavia, before discussing more specifically the time constraints, I had a specific question regarding the KEIT project when I see how imbricated it is with other open source projects. How do you manage to build something that is so heavily relying on other components which are also open source? Flavia (29:47)Well, first of all, it's great to have those tools because otherwise we couldn't have built what we built. We just put them together. what we needed to check is the licensing to make sure that we are not infringing any of the licenses of the software that we are using. so far we've had good experience. for example, one of the projects that we are using is so there's electricity maps and there's an exporter for Prometheus to get that data into Kubernetes. It's called the grid intensity, From the GreenWeb Foundation. And it's also open source and there was something that didn't work exactly like we expected or we needed to make an improvement and we just made the change. Applied our PR. It was approved and problem solved. So in that sense, it can be easy because given the need, you can just make the changes yourself. Niki (30:53)I think this is the issue of open source tooling and how well maintained it is, or if there is enough contribution to keep it running is kind of a bigger problem in the industry and for Kubernetes and the Kubernetes ecosystem as well. Like even though a lot of these projects are hosted by the CNCF. Oftentimes, there isn't everything that you might need your use case. And maybe someone needs to find time to contribute back to the open source project. For example, like if there's a feature missing or if there's a bug. Oftentimes there needs to be that kind of instinct of like, okay, this is missing. I'm going to take some time to contribute upstream. Upstream meaning to the open source project. And that's how the tools can continue to exist. But there also need to be long-term maintainers who are sponsored by their company, maybe, who are given the opportunity to take time to contribute to open source projects as part of their work. one of the main challenges in open source projects, I would say is, people finding time to contribute to this project. Gaël Duez (32:18)Niki, that's very interesting that you mentioned people being employees of corporations, large or not, and having some of their professional time allocated to open source. Because I've been recently recording in releasing actually an episode on the WordPress sustainability group that has been quite brutally dismantled. And that was part of a bigger drama of WordPress governance it made me realize how much the WordPress community is dependent on automatic. Is it something that you fear also for the CNCF? Is it something that is more the exception than the rules or what is your? Yeah. Point of view on this dependency that we might find from time to time. Niki (33:09)the CNCF has managed to build a huge community of people who are excited and able to contribute to their projects. And this is an extraordinary feat of like modern technology and like community building. So I would say I'm not. I'm not worried about Kubernetes itself or the really large projects hosted by the CNCF, there's always an underlying worry or an underlying realization that we need to contribute back to what we're using. And maybe that's kind of part of the success of all these open source projects. if a lot of companies are depending on it for their operations and then they have an incentive to contribute back to keep things running. a sociological aspect, I find it fascinating Gaël Duez (34:09)And maybe because you've sort of already explained it, but if both of you, had to, I don't know, bring three ingredients to create the perfect recipe for a thriving open source community, such as the that you belong to, what would it be? Niki (34:29)Great question. Flavia (34:30)I would say purpose is one all these people also that you see in the open source community, like in conferences, like FOSDEM, they really believe in something. They are not just techies, but they, I mean, they are techies, but they, believe in the power of the people building something and being free and open. So purpose is one. Now what I was going to say, so everybody who is there really wants to be there, contribute to something bigger than themselves. And I wanted to mention because the TAG ecosystem in the CNCF now is going through a restructuring because well, after many years of the development of the Kubernetes software ecosystem, things changed. And so we used to have the TAG environmental sustainability, TAG security, TAG application delivery, and a couple more. And now this is all going to be restructured. Does this have anything to do with the current situation? Because the NCF, even if it's a… and nonprofits, it is based in the United States. Does it have anything to do with the political situation in the US? I don't know, maybe. So the TAG environmental sustainability will be renamed, will be part of a different TAG. My point being that even through all of this, there's all this bunch of people that I'm part of, which is want to continue. We don't care the naming. We just want to continue with what we are doing. I don't know in the case maybe of WordPress I don't know because I couldn't finish the episode of last time I don't know if the people who were working on it will continue because in the end it's all open source. You can still do what you want. Niki (36:35)I mean, I think that the open source community enables us to work on things that otherwise would be difficult to do on the day to day. Because there will always be changes in the business direction, for example. Whereas open source work means you can always get back to it and continue some work and do it for as long as the community decides to work on that. So it does give a lot of freedom. another thing I would say is that new problems require new solutions. think innovating in the open is a great way to build new solutions. For me, innovating in the open is the best way to really bright and motivated people involved to come together and try to solve this together rather than behind closed doors, which is what business often is like. So it's really great to be able to maintain those spaces. And I'm glad that the Green Reviews Working Group will continue to exist as a project in the CNCF, despite of the reorganization that is happening. And we'll know more around KubeCon Europe, which is going to happen in April Gaël Duez (38:01)Thanks a lot for sharing your opinions and your s on how to run successfully in open source community. I could not not hear some or expectations regarding this reorganization? Do you already have some information which has been shared or will it all come as a big surprise at KubeCon Europe as you say there, Niki? Flavia (38:22)It was already shared, the reorganization. So there's going to be like five TAGS and sustainability will be part of, operational resilience, I think. So it will be more up to us to make this visible and to keep it going. the community is there, people want to improve. So we'll keep going. Gaël Duez (38:57)Concretely speaking, it's a general reduction of the number of TAG groups within the NCF, am I right? Or is it just specifically targeting the environmental sustainability TAG? Flavia (39:11)It's a reorganization of all the tags. So some are merged, some are new Gaël Duez (39:13)Okay. Okay, got it. And so now you've got bigger tags, five only, and I guess they will structure in subgroups, subworking group, like some of them working more on operation or resiliency, efficiency, sustainability, or how will all those different projects will be maintained with this single big TAG, for instance. Flavia (39:38)Yeah, there will be, I think, like sub-projects. in theory, working groups will continue running. They will just be part of a different TAG. So we will have to see if the chair of the talk where we are in, we hope that they all that is also someone who considers sustainability important. it's all volunteer work, but we get from the CNCF, we get resources for, for example, infrastructure and where to run our software, pipelines, our databases. So yeah, we'll see how this develops, but we all want to continue. Niki (40:25)I'm excited also to see how sustainability can fit in the operational resilience kind of story, includes, for example, it observability, more concretely, like traditional observability, as opposed to like carbon observability, right? I think it's interesting to see how it will become part of that operational resiliency story. think it might actually, in the best case scenario, might help folks to explain how sustainability fits in software. Flavia (41:09)It's software. Niki (41:10)I guess Flavia (41:10)I guess. Niki (41:11)If we're talking about resiliency, I don't think it's too far away. I'm hoping to learn from that. I think having closer proximity to other domains will mean there will be a lot of like cross pollination of ideas and lessons learned and more contributors maybe, maybe contributors who would not have approached sustainability, learn more about it by being in the same TAG. So I'm hoping to find like positives from this and I guess we'll talk about it more at KubeCon and we'll see how it will go. Gaël Duez (41:52)That's a good point and it's a very optimistic way to see things that I really enjoy. Maybe we will have to redo an episode in a few months or before the end of the year to see how, yeah, to be continued. Yes, absolutely. to understand a bit how things developed. The WordPress situation was a worrying signal, but it doesn't mean that all the open source community needs to be continued, shut down sustainability or reorganize it. So if you feel optimistic, that's great. And I think on these very positive notes we can close this podcast. Flavia (42:29)Yeah. Gaël Duez (42:32)I really want to thank both of you for ing and explaining both the projects you've been running, but also the way you've been dealing with these open source projects and how this open source community at CNTF works. that was really enlightening. So thanks a lot for ing the show today. Niki (42:53)Thank you so much for having us. Flavia (42:53)Thank you, it was fun. Niki (42:54)Thank you so much for having us. Flavia (42:54)Thank you, it was fun. Gaël Duez (42:56)Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode. If you enjoyed it, please share it on social media and TAG your connections working in cloud operations and DevOps. If you attend KubeCon next week, this would also be a useful tool to kickstart conversations. And of course, don't forget to give us five stars on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform. It helps us reach out to more soon-to-be responsible technologists.  In our next episode, we will celebrate a birthday with Sarah Hsu. A year ago, her book, Building Green Software, was released. And she will tell us everything about its impact, the she received with her co-author Anne Curie and Sarah Bergman, and the trends she sees in green software, including AI training and inference. Stay tuned!  One last thing, Green IO is a podcast and much more. So visit greenio.tech to subscribe to our free monthly newsletter, read the latest articles on our blog and check the conferences we organize across the globe.  Green IO Singapore and Green IO New York are just around the corner, respectively in April and May. Early bird tickets are gone. But you can get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP. Lucky you. Just make sure to have one before the 50 free tickets are all gone. I'm looking forward to meeting you there to help you, fellow responsible technologists, build a greener digital world. ❤️ Never miss an episode! Hit the subscribe button on the player above and follow us the way you like.  📧 Our Green IO monthly newsletter is also a good way to be notified, as well as getting carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents. " data-title="Descripción:" title="Descripción">

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