How to Love K8s and Not Wreck The Planet (keynote)

A presentation at Kubecon Europe 2020 by Holly Cummins

How to Love K8s and Not Wreck the Planet

How to Love K8s and Not Wreck the Planet

we have a problem

we have a problem

the earth is getting warmer

the earth is getting warmer

the earth is getting warmer

the earth is getting warmer

warmer

warmer

uncomfortably warmer

uncomfortably warmer

drought

drought

floods

floods

submersion

submersion

hurricanes

hurricanes

fires

fires

our industry contributes to climate change

our industry contributes to climate change

The past five years have been the warmest since records began. Human activity, including the IT industry, is driving worrying climate change. Data centres alone consume 3% of the world’s energy, and more and more of that energy is being used by Kubernetes and workloads running on Kubernetes. Is k8s helping, or making things worse?

The beauty of the cloud is that it makes it easy to run code, virtualised and scheduled for efficiency… but it doesn’t provide any guarantee that what’s running is useful. Even when the workload is high-value and efficient, Kube sprawl can lead to low utilisation, unsatisfactory elasticity, and high costs - but mega-mono-clusters have their own problems around isolation, security, and management. How should these competing requirements be balanced? This talk discusses some of the trade-offs and provides a roadmap to figuring out the right thing.

Video

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