Jonathan Lalou's Blog

Posts Tagged ‘Sustainability’

Ori Pekelman, co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Platform.sh, a vanguard in cloud orchestration renowned for its B Corp ethos and gold-tier sustainability accolades from EcoVadis and Greenly, delivered a sanguine exploration at DotAI 2024. With a career steeped in open-source advocacy and privacy preservation, Pekelman dissected the deployment dialectic: optimizing large language models not merely for velocity but for vitality—ensuring computational cascades contribute to ecological equilibrium. His address, laced with levity—from kitten conjurations to carbon calculus—illuminated pathways where ingenuity intersects with introspection, urging practitioners to calibrate choices that cherish both efficacy and Earth.

Decoding the Deployment Dilemma: From Data Centers to Decarbonization

Pekelman pierced the veil of AI’s ecological ledger, positing that while large language model ecosystems emit a mere sliver—under 0.03% of planetary particulates—the trajectory toward terawatt tempests demands deliberate design. He heralded nascent nobility: entities embracing the Climate Pledge, carbon-neutral chronicles since antiquity, and B Corp beacons like Platform.sh, where audits affirm stewardship across spectra.

Yet, profundity prevails in pragmatism. Pekelman parsed provisioning pitfalls: hyperscalers’ hegemony, where NVIDIA’s nexus narrows options, yielding underutilization—GPUs idling at 20-30% amid middleware morasses. Liberation lurks in lattice diversification: AMD’s MI300X matrices mirroring Mistral’s mandates, Intel’s Gaudi grappling Grok’s girth—plurality propelling progress, decentralizing dependency while diluting draw.

Liquid cooling’s liberation emerged as linchpin: kilowatt cascades in cabinets, thermals tamed to turbocharge throughput sans thermal throttling. Virtualization’s vanguard—passthrough partitions, SR-IOV’s segmented surges—ensconces enclaves in isolation, ironclad against interference, sans silos’ silos.

Storage’s strata summoned scrutiny: NVMe’s nexus, disaggregated via Ethernet’s expanse—RDMA’s relays rivaling PCIe proximity. Pekelman pondered cold starts’ scourge: seconds squandered in summoning sentinels, autoscalers adrift. Remedies resonate in replication: memory mirroring, snapshots sequestering states for millisecond resurrections on CPUs, aspiring to accelerator alacrity through PCIe Gen5’s gales—500GB/s conduits coursing currents.

Hints from heights harmonize: applications augur accesses, prefetching payloads—caches clairvoyant, latencies lacerated. Pekelman’s prism: omnipresent optimizations, from opcode osmosis to orchestration oases—layers layered in synergy.

Navigating Novelties: Toward Tenfold Thrift and Thoughtful Trade-Offs

Pekelman’s prognosis pulsed with promise: tenfold thrift by tomorrow’s dawn, leviathans liberated for legions, where monetary metrics meld with moral mandates. Yet, yield yields to yield: synchronous summons to eight-H100 hordes herald hubris, unsustainable sans science’s salve—no sorcery signals salvation in silicon’s span.

Green gradients gleam in GPU eschewal: CPU cascades for cached queries, PG Vector’s prowess in proximity. Retrieval’s renaissance: vector vaults as versatile vaults—latent layers’ low-dimensional distillates, semantic sentinels for distance-driven discoveries, eclipsing exhaustive embeddings.

Pekelman pivoted to pipelines: RAG’s retrievals, not rote recitations—embeddings as echoes, obviating oracles. His heuristic: hoard hints—fine-tunes as fulcrums, inferences as investments—where uncached calls cull kittens, cached cascades conserve.

In epilogue, Pekelman exhorted equilibrium: trade-offs as talismans—code’s cadence over convenience’s caress, safety’s sanctuary over splendor’s siren. Platform.sh’s paragon: audits affirming affinity, where infrastructure inspires introspection. As he quipped, “Save kittens”—a summons to stewardship, where deployments dance delicately, dignifying digits and domain alike.

Links:

• Platform.sh Website
• Ori Pekelman on LinkedIn

At Devoxx Greece 2024, Katie Gamanji, a senior field engineer at Apple and a technical oversight committee member for the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), delivered a compelling presentation on advancing environmental sustainability within the cloud-native ecosystem. With Kubernetes celebrating its tenth anniversary, Katie emphasized the urgent need for technologists to integrate green practices into their infrastructure strategies. Her talk explored how tools like Kepler and KEDA’s carbon-aware operator enable practitioners to measure and mitigate carbon emissions, while fostering a vibrant, inclusive community to drive these efforts forward. Drawing from her extensive experience and leadership in the CNCF, Katie provided a roadmap for aligning technological innovation with climate responsibility.

The Imperative of Cloud Sustainability

Katie began by underscoring the critical role of sustainability in the tech sector, particularly given the industry’s contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions. She highlighted that the tech sector accounts for 1.4% of global emissions, a figure that could soar to 10% within a decade without intervention. However, by leveraging renewable energy, emissions could be reduced by up to 80%. International agreements like COP21 and the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have spurred national regulations, compelling organizations to assess and report their carbon footprints. Major cloud providers, such as Google Cloud Platform (GCP), have set ambitious net-zero targets, with GCP already operating on renewable energy since 2022. Yet, Katie stressed that sustainability cannot be outsourced solely to cloud providers; organizations must embed these principles internally.

The emergence of “GreenOps,” inspired by FinOps, encapsulates the processes, tools, and cultural shifts needed to achieve digital sustainability. By optimizing infrastructure—through strategies like using spot instances or serverless architectures—organizations can reduce both costs and emissions. Katie introduced a four-phase strategy proposed by the FinOps Foundation’s Environmental Sustainability Working Group: awareness, discovery, roadmap, and execution. This framework encourages organizations to educate stakeholders, benchmark emissions, implement automated tools, and iteratively pursue ambitious sustainability goals.

Measuring Emissions with Kepler

To address emissions within Kubernetes clusters, Katie introduced Kepler, a CNCF sandbox project developed by Red Hat and IBM. Kepler, a Kubernetes Efficient Power Level Exporter, utilizes eBPF to probe system statistics and export power consumption metrics to Prometheus for visualization in tools like Grafana. Deployed as a daemon set, Kepler collects node- and container-level metrics, focusing on power usage and resource utilization. By tracing CPU performance counters and Linux kernel trace points, it calculates energy consumption in joules, converting this to kilowatt-hours and multiplying by region-specific emission factors for gases like coal, petroleum, and natural gas.

Katie demonstrated Kepler’s practical application using a Grafana dashboard, which displayed emissions per gas and allowed granular analysis by container, day, or namespace. This visibility enables organizations to identify high-emission components, such as during traffic spikes, and optimize accordingly. As a sandbox project, Kepler is gaining momentum, and Katie encouraged attendees to explore it, provide feedback, or contribute to its development, reinforcing its potential to establish a baseline for carbon accounting in cloud-native environments.

Scaling Sustainably with KEDA’s Carbon-Aware Operator

Complementing Kepler’s observational capabilities, Katie introduced KEDA (Kubernetes Event-Driven Autoscaler), a graduated CNCF project, and its carbon-aware operator. KEDA, created by Microsoft and Red Hat, scales applications based on external events, offering a rich catalog of triggers. The carbon-aware operator optimizes emissions by scaling applications according to carbon intensity—grams of CO2 equivalent emitted per kilowatt-hour consumed. In scenarios where infrastructure is powered by renewable sources like solar or wind, carbon intensity approaches zero, allowing for maximum application replicas. Conversely, high carbon intensity, such as from coal-based energy, prompts scaling down to minimize emissions.

Katie illustrated this with a custom resource definition (CRD) that configures scaling behavior based on carbon intensity forecasts from providers like WattTime or Electricity Maps. In her demo, a Grafana dashboard showed an application scaling from 15 replicas at a carbon intensity of 530 to a single replica at 580, dynamically responding to grid data. This proactive approach ensures sustainability is embedded in scheduling decisions, aligning resource usage with environmental impact.

Nurturing a Sustainable Community

Beyond technology, Katie emphasized the pivotal role of the Kubernetes community in driving sustainability. Operating on principles of inclusivity, open governance, and transparency, the community fosters innovation through technical advisory groups (TAGs) focused on domains like observability, security, and environmental sustainability. The TAG Environmental Sustainability, established just over a year ago, aims to benchmark emissions across graduated CNCF projects, raising awareness and encouraging greener practices.

To sustain this momentum, Katie highlighted the need for education and upskilling. Resources like the Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate (KCNA) certification and her own Cloud Native Fundamentals course on Udacity lower entry barriers for newcomers. By diversifying technical and governing boards, the community can continue to evolve, ensuring it scales alongside technological advancements. Katie’s vision is a cloud-native ecosystem where innovation and sustainability coexist, supported by a nurturing, inclusive community.

Conclusion

Katie Gamanji’s presentation at Devoxx Greece 2024 was a clarion call for technologists to prioritize environmental sustainability. By leveraging tools like Kepler and KEDA’s carbon-aware operator, practitioners can measure and mitigate emissions within Kubernetes clusters, aligning infrastructure with climate goals. Equally important is the community’s role in fostering education, inclusivity, and collaboration to sustain these efforts. Katie’s insights, grounded in her leadership at Apple and the CNCF, offer a blueprint for innovating through green technology while building a resilient, forward-thinking ecosystem.

Links:

• Apple company website
• Cloud Native Computing Foundation website

Hélène Maitre-Marchois, a Scrum Master and co-founder of Fairness, delivered a thought-provoking presentation at Forum PHP 2021, urging developers to embrace digital sobriety to reduce the environmental impact of technology. Drawing on her work at Fairness, a cooperative focused on responsible digital solutions, Hélène challenged the audience to rethink feature development and prioritize sustainability. Her talk, blending ecological awareness with practical strategies, inspired developers to make impactful choices. This post explores four key themes: the environmental cost of digital technology, questioning feature necessity, optimizing user experience, and fostering sustainable practices.

The Environmental Cost of Digital Technology

Hélène Maitre-Marchois opened by highlighting the significant environmental footprint of digital technology, noting that it accounts for 3–4% of global greenhouse gas emissions, a figure growing by 8% annually. She emphasized that the internet is not intangible—data centers, networks, and user devices consume vast resources. Hélène referenced studies from GreenIT and The Shift Project, underscoring that user devices, with low recycling rates, contribute heavily to this impact. By framing coding as an energy-intensive activity, she urged developers to consider the ecological consequences of their work, from CPU usage to disk operations.

Questioning Feature Necessity

A core message of Hélène’s talk was the importance of challenging the need for every feature. She advocated for a “why” mindset, questioning whether functionalities truly serve users or merely satisfy client assumptions. Hélène shared examples where client-driven features, like flashy designs, were less valuable than anticipated when tested with users. By prioritizing minimal, purposeful development, developers can reduce resource consumption, aligning with the principles of eco-design that Fairness champions, ensuring applications are both functional and environmentally responsible.

Optimizing User Experience

Hélène stressed that sustainable design enhances user experience without sacrificing aesthetics. She suggested practical measures, such as using dark backgrounds to reduce screen energy consumption, as black pixels require less power than white ones on many displays. By optimizing user journeys and focusing on essential information, developers can create efficient, user-friendly applications. Hélène’s approach, rooted in her Scrum Master experience, emphasizes collaboration with designers and stakeholders to balance usability and sustainability, ensuring applications meet real user needs.

Fostering Sustainable Practices

Concluding her presentation, Hélène encouraged developers to adopt sustainable coding practices, such as optimizing database queries and choosing energy-efficient data formats. She highlighted the role of ethical designers and community initiatives like La Fresque du Numérique in promoting digital sobriety. By integrating these practices, developers can contribute to a cleaner internet, aligning with Fairness’ mission to build a responsible digital ecosystem. Hélène’s call to action inspired attendees to rethink their workflows and prioritize ecological responsibility in their projects.

Links:

• Fairness website
• La Fresque du Numérique

Olivier Philippot is an electronics and computer engineer with over a decade of experience in energy management systems and sustainable technology design. Having worked in R&D labs and large industrial groups, he has dedicated his career to understanding the environmental footprint of digital systems. A founding member of the French Green IT community, Olivier contributes regularly to GreenIT.fr, participates in AFNOR working groups on eco-design standards, and trains organizations on sustainable IT practices. His work bridges hardware, software, and policy to reduce the carbon intensity of computing.

This article presents a comprehensively expanded analysis of Olivier Philippot’s 2012 DevoxxFR presentation, Obésiciel and Environmental Impact: Green Patterns Applied to Java, reimagined as a foundational text on software eco-design and technical debt’s environmental cost. The talk introduced the concept of obésiciel, software that grows increasingly resource-hungry with each release, driving premature hardware obsolescence. Philippot revealed a startling truth: manufacturing a single computer emits seventy to one hundred times more CO2 than one year of use, yet software bloat has tripled performance demands every five years, reducing average PC lifespan from six to two years.

Through Green Patterns, JVM tuning strategies, data efficiency techniques, and lifecycle analysis, this piece offers a practical framework for Java developers to build lighter, longer-lived, and lower-impact applications. Updated for 2025, it integrates GraalVM native images, Project Leyden, energy-aware scheduling, and carbon-aware computing, providing a complete playbook for sustainable Java development.

The Environmental Cost of Software Bloat

Manufacturing a laptop emits two hundred to three hundred kilograms of CO2 equivalent. The use phase emits twenty to fifty kilograms per year. Software-driven obsolescence forces upgrades every two to three years. Philippot cited Moore’s Law irony: while transistors double every eighteen months, software efficiency has decreased due to abstraction layers, framework overhead, and feature creep.

Green Patterns for Data Efficiency

Green Patterns for Java include data efficiency. String concatenation in loops is inefficient:

String log = "";
for (String s : list) log += s;

Use StringBuilder instead:

StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
for (String s : list) sb.append(s);

Also use compression, binary formats like Protocol Buffers, and lazy loading.

JVM Tuning for Energy Efficiency

JVM optimization includes:

-XX:+UseZGC
-XX:ReservedCodeCacheSize=128m
-XX:+UseCompressedOops
-XX:+UseContainerSupport

GraalVM Native Image reduces memory by ninety percent, startup to fifty milliseconds, and energy by sixty percent.

Carbon-Aware Computing in 2025

EDIT:
In 2025, carbon-aware Java includes Project Leyden for static images without warmup, energy profilers like JFR and PowerAPI, cloud carbon APIs from AWS and GCP, and edge deployment to reduce data center hops.

Links

Relevant links include GreenIT.fr at greenit.fr, GraalVM Native Image at graalvm.org/native-image, and the original video at YouTube: Obésiciel and Environmental Impact.