 So let's start with some introductions. So we have Rima. Hi everybody. I'm Rima Iantal from Redhead. I'm here to represent telecommunications technology. We've spent all of my career from Verizon to now being a chief telco architect here at Redhead, and I've lived through the whole transition from plain old telephone service to now moving into 6G. And Marla? Hi, I'm Marla Weston. I'm a cloud software architect over at Intel, and I'm also a CNCF Environmental Sustainability Tag Chair. I've worked in many places, including firmware, HPC tooling, security software, kernel drivers, MLops, and Kubernetes cloud software, and now I'm working both on performance and sustainability in the cloud. I enjoy gardening, playing with hardware, and exercises involving adrenaline. Tammy? Hi everyone. I'm Tammy McClellan. I'm a cloud solution architect at Microsoft. I'm also the chair of the oversight committee for the Green Software Foundation, and I co-chair the community working group. I also have a small farm in Michigan where I grow flowers, herbs, and veggies sustainably and share them with my local community. And Nicky? Hi everyone. I'm Nicky Manolidakis. I'm a software engineer at Grafana Labs. I'm a lead in the CNCF Environmental Sustainability Tag, where I co-chair the brand new Green Reviews working group. I've been organizing grassroots for many years, and I live in the natural park. Let's start with a question for the audience. How many of you know how much power it takes to run your software? Can anyone raise their hand or make a noise or something? If you know how much power you actually take. With that, let's jump into the first question. How much power does it take? Let's start with Nicky. It's a very difficult question to answer. What is the carbon footprint of our software? It's a question we're trying to answer in the sustainability tag. To give you a high-level example, the average estimated carbon footprint of conference attendees is equivalent to servers running AI workloads, 10 servers running AI workloads for four days at full capacity. So, you know, measuring and reducing the energy and carbon footprints of our software is not a very widespread practice yet, but this is changing, and we are seeing momentum around this. Okay. And why does sustainability matter? Yeah. Also, Nicky. We need to find solutions to preserve the world around us. We are very close to exceeding the 1.5 degrees Celsius of tipping point, and we have already exceeded this 1.5 degrees tipping point in certain regions. It is scary to think about it, I know, but we need stubborn optimism to create spaces, find solutions, empower each other, and create change as a community. And I think as engineers, we understand stubborn optimism, because when we're stuck, we iterate, we continuously find solutions to problems. So, I think in the CNCF, by innovating in the open, as a community, we can drive change, and together we can save all that we can save. And Tammy. Sure. I think at least now we can all agree sustainability matters. The fighting about that seemed to assist, but being aware of how much carbon is being spent, and taking steps to improve those numbers can make a giant impact. In one case, after identifying the amount of carbon, the solution spent, we were able to reduce it by 45% with just right-sizing the VMs where the software runs. Marla? So, we should also be looking at how to save on power, and data centers use 1 to 2% of the world's power, and are estimated to consume 1,000 kilowatts per square meter, or the average of 10 American homes. And this is before we started adding power-hungry XPUs, I know we call them GPUs, but I call them XPUs, and the backend networking required for the systems. With preliminary testing, multiple people have shown that there can be a 20 to 30% savings on power without powering down the systems. For large data centers, or even cases where there are many edge systems, saving 20 to 30% on power is a huge savings financially. We can move the workloads where proximity does not matter to places where power is cheap, both environmentally and monetarily, as long as the cost of transport, the data for the workload does not exceed the power savings in the transfer. Marla? So, as you can tell, awareness of climate change and of our impact on environment is growing, and the world governments are recognizing that and taking actions. They're defining targets for greenhouse gas emissions, and also they are adapting sustainability reporting regulations, which would allow us to figure out how much individual companies are contributing to greenhouse gas emissions. And energy consumption is the biggest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. Energy supply sector is responsible for about a third of all the world emissions. Energy supply companies are responsible for 30% while telecom companies are consuming up to 3% of all the power by humanity. If we add to that other parts of the information and communication technology sector, like data centers, equipment manufacturer, consumer electronics, and some projections showed that we're going to consume up to 9,000 terawatt hours by 2030. That's roughly equivalent to 800 billion average U.S. households. Electricity also is responsible or accounts for up to 8% of carriers revenues. Some are paying upwards of a billion dollars a year in power bills. That's a huge financial burden. On top of that, some countries are simply running out of available power. So regulations, mandatory reporting, carbon credits where companies can create offset projects or pay for their pollution are all meant to mitigate our sustainability problems, but I think we can still do more. So what available tooling is there in Kubernetes to help with this? I'll start with Tammy. Sure. So the SCI, which stands for software carbon intensity, was created by the Green Software Foundation, and it's a standard for measuring carbon and software. And it's in its final stages of being approved as an ISO standard. So we can use it to measure Kubernetes clusters and also any workloads. It really takes a holistic approach to software, which includes not only the software where it's running, but the region where it's running and the hardware it's running on. So being able to measure carbon and software is super critical as it allows us to analyze the data and experiment with reductions which drives efficiency. Nikki? So actually we are using the SCI as a leading principle in some of the work that we do in the CNCF sustainability tag. I really liked Marlowe's model that she mentioned, that the Green Software Foundation specifies what to measure in the CNCF tag. We show how to do this using cloud native tooling. And yeah, we recently created the Green Reviews Working Group, which is the first technical project of the tag. And our goal is to collaborate with CNCF projects with the maintainers to gather the energy and carbon footprint of the project and assess their sustainability and find ways to improve this. So for energy monitoring we're using Kepler. Kepler is an EBPF-based energy monitoring tool, which recently became a CNCF sandbox project. And volunteers are needed for the working group. You can join us on Slack. We have some of the links in the resources in the QR code behind us. Come talk to us during the tag meeting, which is in about an hour from now. And join the meetings. Maybe contribute or learn with us. Rima? Sure. So there are tools that can be applied in the context of a Kubernetes cluster, but I wanted to talk first about what we can do at the level of individual nodes. An idle server already draws 50 to 70% of its peak utilization power without even doing anything. And in an active server, CPU is one of the largest contributors to power consumption. So we can start at the level of the individual node by introducing things like liquid cooling or being very judicious about the hardware components. We can select and size them to the actual expected loads. And then we can use modern workload-aware CPUs. And then on top of that, apply software tunings using tools like operator or Kubernetes power manager to manipulate the actual settings of the individual cores to minimize their power impact. So you can adjust things like encore frequencies, C states for levels of idle sleep, P states for voltage frequency controls. And it all might not sound as a big deal, but we've already shown that you can reduce power consumption by 30% utilizing these tools, even for very performance-intensive workloads. And Marla? So the other piece that you need to look at is where your workloads are landing. So schedulers help determine where the workloads land when scheduled. Landing on the correct node with the correct number of available resources, that's critical, in preventing a waste of resources. One CNCF-supported scheduling project is KEDA, which is in graduated status as of August, which is great. It's also known as Kubernetes event-driven autoscaling. A carbon-aware KEDA operator was released in April as an example and demonstrates carbon intensity data from third-party sources to adjust the scaling behaviors. There's also a new concept of intent-driven orchestration, which is specific to looking at the properties of desired of the resources instead of specific resources and scheduling accordingly with that information. This space, as I see it, has a huge potential going forward for helping optimize placement both within classic data centers and on the edge. So which organizations and projects are leading the way for environmental sustainability in the world of cloud-native? Let's start with Tammy. Sure. The Green Software Foundation was formed under the Linux Foundation with the mission to create a trusted ecosystem of people, standards, toolings, and best practices for building green software. So organizations with a shared commitment to sustainability and an interest in green software development principles are encouraged to join the foundation to help grow the field of green software engineering, contribute to the standards for the industry, and then work together to reduce the carbon emission of software. Microsoft is leveraging the foundation by working with other companies to build a sustainable future by embedding sustainability into their organizations and partnering with industry leaders around the globe. Marla? I am most involved within the CNCF Environmental Sustainability Tag as a chair. They're also the chairs Max Korbacher and Leonard Polk. We have a large community and there's a lot of knowledge of tooling there, so please do come show up. We have multiple working groups, including our new green reviews. So talk to Nikki about it. And Rima? There are certain initiatives you can get involved with in the Talco space as well. Some of them is Next Generation Mobile Networks, Green Future Network Project. You can also contribute to open RAN Alliance Sustainability Use Cases or get involved in IETF Sustainability Insights. So Marla, can you close this up for us? Yeah, please do get involved. Feel free to visit us. We're all on Slack. We'll be wandering around. We'll come join our meetings with our various organizations. Thank you so much for listening. We're very excited to be here and speak about this subject because it's fairly important. Fantastic. Well, a round of applause, everyone.