Conversations on Community, Cloud Infrastructure, and Sustainability

Niki Manoledaki and Stephanie Hingtgen from Grafana discuss their open source community roles and contributions toward environmental sustainability. Niki serves as a co-chair of the Green Reviews Working Group within the CNCF Environmental Sustainability Technical Advisory Group, focusing on promoting energy and carbon efficiency. Stephanie works on both the open source Grafana project and Grafana Cloud, emphasizing the value of contributing to open source. We discuss the importance of energy consumption metrics in technology, the use of Kubernetes for event-driven auto-scaling through KEDA, and efforts to enhance operational and environmental efficiency. Niki and Stephanie share insights on scaling applications, the relationship between cost reduction and environmental sustainability, and introduce several projects like Karpenter and Kepler. 00:00 Introduction to Grafana's Community Engagement01:40 Exploring Environmental Sustainability in Tech04:30 Diving into Open Source Contributions and Projects05:26 Scaling and Autoscaling: Insights and Challenges12:56 Cost vs. Environmental Sustainability19:06 Personal Journeys into Open Source Software21:24 Closing Thoughts on Open Source and Sustainability Resources How Grafana Labs switched to Karpenter to reduce costs and complexities in Amazon EKS Guests Niki Manoledaki is a software engineer, environmental sustainability advocate, keynote speaker, meetup organiser, and community facilitator. She advocates for environmental sustainability in the CNCF as a Lead of the CNCF Environmental Sustainability TAG where she co-chairs the Green Reviews WG. Stephanie Hingtgen is a Senior Software Engineer II at Grafana Labs. As a member of the Grafana as a Service team, her focus has been on orchestrating thousands of Grafana instances in Kubernetes for Grafana Cloud. Her previous experience includes developing a private cloud platform to provision Kubernetes resources for engineers at Comcast.