Keynote: Building IT Green: A Journey of Platforms, Data, and Developer Empowerment at Deutsche Bahn
Summary
TLDRThe speaker shares a personal story of struggling with illness while highlighting the urgent issue of climate change. They emphasize the importance of individual and collective action, drawing parallels with the power of a surfing wave. The narrative then shifts to the role of technology and digitalization in addressing climate challenges, particularly focusing on sustainable mobility and the green digitalization initiative. The speaker advocates for the empowerment of developers to make significant changes through efficient use of resources and the implementation of energy-saving strategies in cloud operations, exemplified by the use of Kubernetes and other tools. The message concludes with a call to action for immediate and informed engagement in environmental conservation efforts.
Takeaways
- π The speaker uses the metaphor of creating a 'big wave' to illustrate the collective power and energy needed to address climate change.
- π· The speaker shares a personal struggle with flu, using it as a narrative to emphasize the importance of overcoming challenges, like tackling climate change.
- ποΈ A connection to nature through surfing is highlighted as a pivotal moment for the speaker's environmental awareness, emphasizing the need for sustainable practices.
- π± The urgency of climate change is discussed, noting that environmental issues have been recognized since the '90s, but insufficient political action has been taken.
- π Sustainable mobility, particularly through train travel, is presented as a crucial solution for achieving climate targets, over relying on infrastructure expansion.
- π‘ The impact of digitalization on energy consumption is acknowledged, with a prediction that it will require the electrical consumption equivalent of Sweden or Germany.
- πΏ The concept of 'green digitalization' is introduced, aiming to address the energy demands of digital technologies through initiatives supported by CEOs and grassroots movements.
- π§ Developers are identified as key agents of change, with the power to influence software and infrastructure efficiency through their everyday decisions.
- π€ Kubernetes is praised as a tool for efficient cloud operations and carbon reduction, with its potential to increase resource utilization and reduce waste.
- π The importance of data visibility and real-time information is emphasized for understanding the energy impact of code changes and workloads.
- π The call to action is for immediate, small-scale beginnings to harness the intrinsic motivation of developers and communities to care for the planet and reduce carbon footprints.
Q & A
What is the main issue the speaker is struggling with at the beginning of the transcript?
-The speaker is struggling with the flu and its effects, which include fever and hallucination dreams, making them question their ability to stand on stage and give a 15-minute talk.
What does the speaker compare to the experience of surfing?
-The speaker compares the adrenaline and energy rush of catching a wave while surfing to the energy and focus they want from the audience during their talk.
What is the urgency the speaker refers to in relation to climate change?
-The urgency the speaker refers to is the need for immediate action on climate change, as environmental issues were already being discussed in the '90s, and despite some political efforts like the Kyoto Protocol, they were insufficient to address the issue.
What is the speaker's connection to the company they mention?
-The speaker is connected to the company through their role in promoting sustainable mobility, specifically through train travel, which they believe is an important aspect of achieving climate targets.
How does the speaker describe the impact of digitalization on energy consumption?
-The speaker describes the impact of digitalization as having an exponential growth in energy consumption, with estimates suggesting a need for the electricity consumption equivalent to that of Sweden or Germany within the next three years.
What is the green digitalization initiative mentioned by the speaker?
-The green digitalization initiative is a movement started in 2022 aimed at addressing the energy demands and environmental impact of digitalization. It is supported by CEOs and CIOs and has resulted in grassroots efforts from developers within the company.
What is the speaker's view on the concept of carbon compensation?
-The speaker believes that while carbon compensation is an important measure, it cannot be the sole solution due to the exponential growth of energy demands. They argue that there are physical limits to growth and that strategies for sufficiency and efficiency are needed.
How does the speaker describe the role of developers in addressing climate change?
-The speaker views developers as everyday decision-makers when it comes to software and believes that engaging them and providing the right tools is crucial for making changes in how code is developed and infrastructure is managed.
What is the significance of Kubernetes for the speaker and their company?
-Kubernetes is seen as a tool for efficient cloud operations and carbon reduction. The speaker believes it is not just a container orchestration tool but also a platform-building tool that can help achieve high density of containers and improve resource utilization.
What solution does the speaker propose for better resource utilization in cloud environments?
-The speaker proposes the use of vertical pod autoscaling to optimize container workloads according to their needs, which can help reduce wasted resources and improve overall efficiency.
How does the speaker suggest measuring the energy impact of workloads?
-The speaker suggests using tools like Kepler to gather energy metrics and provide real-time data on the energy usage of individual components. This data can then be visualized in dashboards, allowing for better understanding and management of energy consumption.
What is the speaker's final advice to the audience?
-The speaker advises the audience to start taking action now, as the issue of climate change is urgent. They encourage starting small and focusing on empowering developers and leveraging platforms to make a positive impact on the environment.
Outlines
π Surfing and the Power of Unity
The speaker begins by sharing a personal story of struggling with the flu and feeling overwhelmed at the prospect of speaking to a large audience. However, they find inspiration in their love for surfing, using the metaphor of creating a 'big wave' to illustrate the collective power of the audience. The speaker emphasizes the importance of individual and collective action, particularly in the face of urgent environmental issues like climate change. They recount the early days of environmental awareness in the '90s and the insufficient political actions taken, such as the Kyoto Protocol, highlighting the need for more robust and engaged efforts to address climate change.
π± Green Digitalization and Developer Empowerment
The speaker transitions into discussing the role of digitalization in sustainability, particularly in the context of cloud computing and its increasing energy demands. They express concern over the limitations of current tools for measuring carbon emissions accurately, especially at the application level. The speaker then introduces the concept of 'green digitalization,' initiated by Deustche Telekom in 2022, which aims to tackle the environmental impact of digital technologies. They stress the importance of empowering developers to make informed decisions about resource usage and efficiency, advocating for platforms like Kubernetes as a means to achieve greener cloud operations.
π Optimizing Cloud Operations for Sustainability
The speaker delves deeper into the practical aspects of optimizing cloud operations for sustainability. They discuss the challenges of managing resource allocation in containerized environments, highlighting the issue of underutilized CPU resources. The speaker advocates for the use of Kubernetes features like vertical pod autoscaling to optimize resource usage and reduce waste. They also mention the benefits of scheduling workloads to align with human work patterns, such as using down scalers to shut down unnecessary processes during off-hours. The speaker emphasizes the need for better data on energy consumption to inform decision-making and introduces tools like Kepler for energy metric analysis, which can provide insights down to the container level.
π Community Building and the Future of Green Technology
In the final paragraph, the speaker reflects on the broader implications of the community's role in driving sustainable practices within technology. They stress the urgency of starting now and the importance of data in guiding efforts to reduce energy consumption. The speaker shares their experience with rolling out Kepler, highlighting the challenges of enterprise readiness and the need to balance detailed metrics with practical monitoring. They conclude by encouraging the audience to start small and to leverage the intrinsic motivation of developers to foster a culture of sustainability. The speaker's call to action is to focus on empowerment, community engagement, and the continuous improvement of green technologies.
Mindmap
Keywords
π‘Flu
π‘Surfing
π‘Climate Change
π‘Sustainability
π‘Digitalization
π‘Kubernetes
π‘Vertical Pod Autoscaler
π‘Green Digitalization
π‘Carbon Compensation
π‘Developer Empowerment
π‘Energy Metrics
Highlights
The speaker shares a personal struggle with flu and uses it as a metaphor for needing help to create a 'wave' of action.
Growing up in an ugly suburb sparked the speaker's appreciation for nature through surfing, highlighting the importance of personal experiences in environmental awareness.
The urgency of climate change is emphasized, noting that environmental issues were recognized in the '90s but political action was insufficient.
The speaker's involvement with a company focused on sustainable mobility through train travel, underscoring the role of individual choices in climate action.
The exponential growth in electricity consumption due to digitalization is discussed, with a prediction of needing the equivalent of Germany's consumption by 2025.
The limitations of current cloud provider tools in measuring application-specific carbon emissions are highlighted, indicating a need for better metrics.
The concept of 'green digitalization' is introduced, showing the industry's response to the environmental impact of technology.
Kubernetes is praised as a tool for efficient cloud operations and carbon reduction, demonstrating the potential of technology to address environmental issues.
The importance of developer empowerment in achieving climate targets is stressed, as they are the decision-makers in software development.
The use of vertical pod autoscaling is suggested to optimize resource usage, reducing waste and improving efficiency.
The concept of scheduling workloads to align with human work patterns is proposed to save energy, such as using down scalers to turn off environments during off-hours.
Information visibility is deemed crucial for making informed decisions on energy usage, with the introduction of a tool like KLA for energy metrics.
The impact of developer actions on carbon emissions is discussed, with the idea of correlating code changes with energy consumption.
The importance of starting now and taking small steps towards energy efficiency and green technology is emphasized.
The call to focus on empowering developers and leveraging their intrinsic motivation to care for the planet is highlighted.
Transcripts
hello Paris hello
everyone I hope you are having a great
time are you having a great
time that's good to know because I'm
having a terrible
time I caught this flu this weekend I
thought how I will I stand to this Stage
15 minutes talking
to 180 M
all and tonight I could not sleep with
fever and I had this kind of
hallucination dreams and so on you know
and I got an idea there
and I I I will need your help so I ask
you that you if you have things on your
lap and so on put them on a safe place
under your
chair and
um first I want to talk why I I I need
this I I grew up in a kind of ugly
suburb of an very beautiful capital city
at the Atlantic and my first Contact to
Nature and uh my interaction with nature
was when going to to the coast to Surf
and you have this moments when you are
surfing and you can be completely wasted
either because you partti the last days
or because you were surfing the whole
day but when there's this wave coming
you get this adrenaline and this energy
because you want to catch this wave and
you definitely don't want to be caught
by the wave so what I'm going to ask you
is that we make a big wave and show the
power of the cuon in Paris and for this
I we I will give you a signal on three
and the of course the first sles go and
you know how wave Works no so let's go
one two
three
ah this was not the wave I would like to
catch come on I want I I want energy I
need your energy and your impulse and I
also want to hear the the the Overflow
rooms and the people at home so everyone
needs to make so again one 2 3
go up to the back yeah thank you thank
you very much so this is the start of
the
[Music]
story the story I'm going to tell you is
precisely about the urgency of climate
change already in the '90s when I was
surfing we had already all this
environment issues coming up and um but
the politics were still not so so far
with it we had the first meetings in in
uh the Rio Janeiro in '92 we had the
first Kyoto Protocol with the first
commitments to climate targets but they
were all kind of insufficient although
science already knew that it's a urgent
matter and requires a multi-level action
and engaging every individual and
organization to achieve the targets that
we need
and um it was not difficult when a
friend of mine um contact me uh one day
and and said hey we have this team at
the Deutsche bar and we do kubernetes
and so on and yeah I love I love this
and but I also said yeah this is
actually a um company with a purpose
because it's I Love Trains I love train
travel and um I like to
um I think sustainable Mobility is um
with trains is a very important to
achieve the climate targets and our
company also believes this so we are
pushing forward to more Train Transport
for Freight and passengers and for
achieving this we obvious cannot just
build infinitely more infrastructure
this is quite heavy infrastructure we
also need to optimize the infrastructure
make it more efficient more modern and
this requires a highly degree of
digitalization but digitalization comes
with an with an
impact and the impact is according to
the International Energy agency quite uh
remarkable we see that in the next three
years according to the last report we
will at least require the amount of
electricity consumption of Sweden and in
the worst case scenario the electricity
consumption of Germany so we are
reaching an exponential consumption
phase and of
course there our um approaches to reduce
it but we also want to approach that the
deutan started a green digitalization
initiative in
20222 to address this
question and it came with the support of
CEOs and cios but it immediately raised
also a very strong Grassroots movement
from developers from employers of the
company that started raising a lot of
initiatives to um small initiatives on
their free times uh making small
contributions uh to measure for example
um the the emissions of websites or uh
to make some papers on how to uh reduce
the impact on your home office work all
kinds of initiatives raising there
and we also had a project where we
wanted to measure and to bring
developers to be able to measure the
impact of our workloads and we started
because we are a cloud uh based uh we
have a cloud cloud-based approach uh we
started to look at what the cloud
providers
uh give us in terms of tools and
unfortunately we did not find uh very um
helpful information because the tools um
have
limitations they are not able to assign
to an application so if I have on my
accounts multiple
applications uh there's no tax support
uh I cannot distinguish it uh the
granularity is very low so I have 50%
ec2 and um 20% everything else it's not
telling me much
it's not very actual sometimes you get
the information three months after uh
the data has been uh created and it does
not give you any information on the
energy use why is this important because
emissions there are calculated also with
compensation and this means that you are
not able to establish a casual casual
relationship between the actions that
you do on your all day and um the the
effect on
emissions and to understand also the
problem of compensation uh I would like
to ask who is your fan of Doctor Who
series yeah quite some yeah great
science fiction series I watch it with
my daughters every uh evening almost and
I we hope still to finish it before they
leave home but um yeah there's this
episode where they say suddenly wake up
in middle of London and London is full
of a forest so this is for me a good
metaphor of compensation of course
compensating carbon is an important
measure but we cannot think that with an
exponential growth scenario of
exponential growth of energy demands
that we will be able to compensate all
this energy because there are
effectively limits to growth physical
limits and and so we need to address the
different strategies for um sufficiency
what I really need and why for
efficiency how do I minimize the
resource used at produ and production
and consistent
which would be the case for example of
of compensation so focusing first of all
on the efficient part and on the role of
developers back to the agents on this
talk I had the to topic developer
empowerment so developers are
effectively effectively the everyday
decision makers in what comes to
software we don't need management papers
to um to say we we are doing this and
achieving this targets if we don't
engage Developers and give them the
tools in the hand we will not be able to
make a change in the way we develop code
in the way we um manage infrastructure
so we POS the question what tools and
and approaches are able to empower these
developers let's start with
platforms we have a platform strategy at
the Doan and in the last years we comb
converge uh the whole subsidiaries to um
enforce standardization in this in this
um level and the importance of platforms
is uh on this aspect is that we can
leverage effects and provide an high
level of standardization and open to
contributions that improve it
continuously and provide safe same
design um aspects that everyone can use
without even thinking am I doing it
green or not it's just um helping you to
be green by
default I myself I'm a bit biased I love
kubernetes I was product owner of two
teams uh in this field and uh have a
personal affility to this but I believe
kubernetes is a tool for efficient Cloud
operations and for carbon F reduction
per Excellence it's not only a container
orchestration tool it's much more
powerful than that it's a platform
building tool and it's a green it
tool we have uh with our clusters
achieved one of the um interesting uh
very high density of containers we have
some shared clusters and we had uh then
put of course the node AO scaling and we
managed to achieve around 70% of CPU
utilization on these shared clusters
it's quite a high utilization so you
would say well we are effective we don't
need to do anything
else the fact is however only 15% of
this utilization was effectively used by
the applications we could see for this
for example on graph dashboards where
there are a lot of reserved um CPU
utilization but only a very small part
of it is being used why is this happen
well once it runs no one cares we are we
have a lot of things to do in our
business all day so I Define requests
and
limits um traditionally um the API uh um
request limits 512 megabytes it is
running I make it conservative because I
think maybe there will be a lot of
people coming and then I cannot burst so
rather have it conservative and it stays
there and it's taking CPU it's occupying
the node and wasting
resources fortunately kubernetes offers
us a vertical P AO scalar there also of
course horizontal Part auto scal and so
on but I find this one particularly
interesting because it is taking out of
the ends of the developer they need to
think what would be the appropriate
resources and rather making
recommendations or even automatically
adjusting the container workloads to be
optimized to their
needs so let's go out with expensive
getwork and make sure to use vertical
pod outo scalar the second aspect
related to the sufficient see is
scheduling and kubernetes is also good
on this you know we have all these
worker rights movements that manage that
we are able to work eight hours a day
and have eight hours to do whatever we
want and eight hours to sleep
I don't think most of you do this anyway
but but let's assume everyone works from
9 to 5 like like like would be the
traditional approach this means two3 of
the day there's no one at the office
and your workloads are running there
development environments test
environments we testing it with test
testing stuff at midnight just turn it
off use Cube down scaler annotate your
deployments so so simple like that it
will turn off when you leave the office
it will turn on again when you when you
come back and it's working you don't
even need to care for it it does it
every day it saves a lot of energy and
it costs
nothing last
aspect we need information
visibility it's like if I am traveling
by train and my train is late or it
fails what do I do if I did not have
good data informing me providing me how
how will be my
Alternatives so this is where we came
with KLA we wanted to grab the energy
metrics and I will not go into detail in
Kepler here because there are 50 at
least 50 people in this room for sure
that know in detail how Kepler um
evaluates um energy statistics and
transforms this into uh into wats uh
but the interesting there is that you
can
actually get information from high level
up to the container level so really have
information on real on near real time on
how much energy your single components
are using and you know in grafana it's
also possible you can make for example
an annotation from your pipeline and
Associate a certain change in your code
with an impact on the
consumption with we tried to roll it out
we thought that's actually yeah great
open source it's available let's just
roll it out it was not so easy the first
one was the Enterprise Readiness in
terms of security there were some
unneeded dependencies um there that we
needed to
remove it were able to give give a
contribution which was
great and the second one was well there
were a lot of metrics so there was
someone being called in the night on the
on call duty and you know how people
hate this no one like to be called in
the night for because the monitoring
system is overloaded so we had to reduce
the um scraping interval which was by
default on 3 seconds to much less and
actually we don't want to keep also so
much data so it's it's enough if we have
10 20 seconds scraping to give this
information about uh what is the effect
of the different
commits so data is the source of
everything and we have seen on the left
side where you see the green is the
kubernetes pushing back to grafana and
it allowed us to make this beautiful
dashboards dashboards are always
something beautiful I I find them at at
least and I think many people love
dashboards and um with this we had the
first tool that really brings this in
the hand of developers to to make a
change and then we of course started
getting more and more people interested
on this and to gather the whole
Cloud carbon footprint um data and we
required a middle layer with our data L
with the data with a data set with data
governance that is in the middle and
allows for other systems to couple and
also create information for other
potential agents like for example
architecture management and Enterprise
architecture management we see here um
an example of the dashboard that we are
building with our Enterprise arit
management system system and um so um
it's about really bringing the tools
also to and and the information to the
tools that are already being used by
these people so as a final remarks I
would like to say the first important
thing is start start now it is urgent
the issue is urgent and we are all in an
early stage of knowing how to actually
measure energy we have lack of
information we don't know if this data
is good but it's better as no data some
information is better as no information
so just start you will see how many
people because really developers have an
intrinsic motivation not really to save
costs but everyone has an intrinsic
motivation to care for our planet I
believe it so just start small and
beautiful and you will see how your
community and your e system around the
platforms and around green it will um
grow and focus on empowerment focus on
engine on the agents on the people that
are on the all day taking decisions with
their actions encourage developer
initiative and their intrisic
motivation so thank you very much um
let's stick together if you want contact
me or any of my colleagues that are also
on this uh conference and um it was a
pleasure to be here and I would like to
to ask the moderator to come here and
because I want you also to experience
this wave yeah so let's do it one more
time if you don't mind H so one two
3 thank you very much have a nice day
thank you so much
[Music]
Quon
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