As sustainability becomes a key priority in modern digital infrastructure, engineering teams are no longer focused only on performance and cost—they also need to understand the environmental impact of their systems.
In the WG04 Sustainability Project, we are addressing this by integrating energy observability into our platform using Kepler.
Why Energy Observability Matters
Today, governments and organizations are pushing for more energy-efficient systems to reduce environmental impact. Cloud providers now share carbon footprint reports, and data centers—while essential—consume massive amounts of energy and contribute significantly to global CO₂ emissions.
The challenge is simple: without visibility into energy usage, it’s very difficult to optimize systems or reduce carbon impact.
Traditional monitoring tools track CPU, memory, and latency, but they don’t show how much energy is being used or how much carbon is being emitted. That’s the gap we aim to fill.
Leveraging Kepler for Energy Metrics
Kepler helps us measure energy consumption directly within Kubernetes environments. It provides detailed insights such as:
- Power consumption at the container and node levels
- Energy usage of CPU and memory
- Estimated energy distribution across workloads
This allows teams to move beyond abstract infrastructure metrics and start working with real energy data.
Building the Green Dashboard
To make this data useful, we created the Green Dashboard — a centralized platform that visualizes:
- Energy consumption across multiple regions
- Estimated CO₂ emissions
- Comparisons between data centers
- Resource utilization across platforms
- Trends over time
With this dashboard, teams can:
- Identify inefficient workloads
- Compare performance across locations
- Find opportunities to optimize systems
For example, a workload running in one country may produce more CO₂ than in another due to differences in energy sources. The dashboard makes these insights visible.
Turning Data into Action
Collecting data is just the beginning. The real value comes from using it. With the Green Dashboard, teams can:
- Make informed decisions about scaling and deployment
- Optimize workloads for both performance and energy efficiency
- Align engineering practices with sustainability goals
Challenges and Learnings
Building this system came with challenges:
- Energy accuracy: estimating real energy usage from hardware metrics requires careful calibration
- CO₂ modeling: emission factors vary significantly across countries
- Data integration: combining data from different environments requires consistency and precision
The Road Ahead
We are continuing to improve the WG04 Sustainability Project with:
- Real-time insights and alerting
- Integration of sustainability metrics into CI/CD pipelines
- Recommendations for energy-efficient deployments
- Improved optimization of energy, CO₂, and resource usage
- Predictive insights based on historical data
- APIs for energy efficiency calculations
- CO2 Manufacturing emissions
Conclusion
By combining Kepler with the Green Dashboard, we’ve built a scalable way to measure and reduce the environmental impact of distributed systems.
With the right tools and visibility, sustainability can become a natural part of engineering decisions—helping build a more energy-efficient digital future.
Join Us!
WG04 is open to everyone, and we’re always looking for contributors.
You can:
- Join the wg-04Sustainability Slack channel
- Attend our weekly Tuesday meetings
- Contribute to open issues labeled “need-volunteer”
If you’re interested in working on sustainability in tech, this is a great place to start. Reach out to us and be part of the journey.
Together, we can build more sustainable infrastructure. 💚
