# [[All about CNCF Environmental Sustainability with Niki Manoledaki]] <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/AuGRCkHml8k" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe> Related:: "[[Niki Manoledaki]], [[Marie Cruz]], [[CNCF TAG - Environmental Sustainability]], [[CNCF]], [[Sustainable observability]], [[Carbon footprint]], [[Kepler]]" ## Summary > [!abstract] AI-generated summary > In this episode of _Adobo and Avocados_, hosts **Marie Cruz** and **Nicole van der Hoeven** speak with **Niki Manoledaki**, a software engineer at Grafana Labs and lead of the **CNCF Environmental Sustainability Technical Advisory Group (TAG)**. The conversation explores Niki’s nontraditional journey into tech, her work at Grafana on cloud capacity and cost optimization, and her leadership in promoting sustainable cloud practices within the CNCF. Together, they discuss how software engineering intersects with environmental responsibility—covering topics like measuring the **carbon footprint of software**, tools such as **Kepler** for energy monitoring, the new **Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) standard**, and the challenges of balancing observability with sustainability. The discussion ties technical performance, cost efficiency, and ecological awareness into a shared goal of making cloud-native computing more sustainable. ## Topics - Introduce [[Niki Manoledaki]] - Capacities team at Grafana Labs - Also part of the TAG (Technical Advisory Group) for Environmental Sustainability - Career background - Her brother was in tech too, and so was her dad, and her mum did work with databases-- but nobody really saw the potential there. - They studied International Relations to find solutions to problems. - They went to Makers Academy: a bootcamp in London to help people change their career and transition into tech. It's an intense bootcamp: one month on your own, three with the group - Now a software engineer at Grafana Labs - Did their dissertation on gender bias - Emergence of cloud computing - What is cloud computing? - Popular services: IaaS, PaaS, SaaS - Benefits - You only pay for what you need - Lowers down operating costs - Scale only when it's needed - Environmental concerns regarding cloud computing - Carbon footprint of cloud computing - CNCF TAG Environmental Sustainability - Introduction - What is CNCF TAG? What does it stand for? - Why was the CNCF TAG Environmental Sustainability group created? - What are some of the group's advocacies? - Focusing on Kubernetes - Right-sizing pods: don't request too much CPU and memory - Applying different types of patterns that are not necessarily new. Energy monitoring started with the industrial revolution but what's new is that we're applying it to the cloud. Ephemeral aspect to the cloud makes us think that resources are unlimited or not real. - What are some of the challenges that the group are facing? - Everyone cares about business cost and improving margins, but what about environmental cost? - Complexity: Cloud complicates how to measure energy consumption - There are tools for measuring consumption per chip. There's a layer of abstraction in the cloud (Hypervisor). [[Kepler]] is trying to solve this - How quickly things change: As of five days ago, we now have a standard that was published that had been in the works for two years. - How can you join it? - What does the group do? - Building a pipeline for all CNCF projects for measuring the power consumption - Prometheus, Kubernetes, Flux, Argo, etc - Software Carbon Intensity specification just came out: it discusses what factors you have to look at to measure the carbon intensity of a piece of software. Standardised way of measuring the carbon intensity of software - Green Software Foundation - also from Linux Foundation, also open source. - [SCI Guidance](https://sci-guide.greensoftware.foundation/) from Green Software - Cloud Carbon Footprint tool that converts cost to consumption: https://www.cloudcarbonfootprint.org/ - Your contributions - How do you raise awareness? - What can people do to help? - https://github.com/cncf/tag-env-sustainability - Any recommended resources to anyone not familiar with cloud-native environmental sustainability? - Outro - What's one piece of advice you would give to women or underrepresented groups who want to have a career in tech? ## Timestamps ## References ## Transcript # All About CNCF Environmental Sustainability with Niki Manoledaki **Marie Cruz:** Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of *A Double Avocados*! I’m Marie Cruz. We took a break for a couple of weeks — I was away, then Nicole went to KubeCon, and then she was off too. But now we’re back, and I’m excited to introduce, as always, my sidekick. **Nicole van der Hoeven:** Hi, I’m the sidekick — Nicole van der Hoeven. Sometimes you just need to take a break from things. Normalize taking breaks! I was actually told to take a break by my manager, which I was really grateful for. **Marie:** I thought you were going to say it was against your will! **Nicole:** No, no. He asked how I was doing personally, and I almost burst into tears. He said, “I think you need a break.” **Marie:** You definitely did. But today, we have someone who *isn’t* taking a break right now — Niki! Please introduce yourself. --- ### Introducing Niki Manoledaki **Niki Manoledaki:** Hi! I’m Niki, a software engineer at Grafana Labs, so a colleague of Nicole’s. I’m also a lead in the CNCF Environmental Sustainability Technical Advisory Group (TAG), which is part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation under the Linux Foundation. **Marie:** Nice! It’s great to have someone else from Grafana on the show. Thank you for joining us! **Niki:** Thank you for having me! **Marie:** I’m bummed that we haven’t met in person yet, but hopefully we’ll see each other at a future conference. Before we talk about the CNCF and the environmental sustainability TAG, let’s get to know you better. What do you do at Grafana Labs, and what do you do for fun? **Niki:** I’m part of the Platform department at Grafana Labs. We maintain the Grafana Cloud infrastructure, and specifically, I’m in the Capacity Squad. We make sure there’s enough capacity and that costs stay low — which ties into sustainability. I work on deploying different types of auto-scalers to ensure resources are efficiently requested and used. For fun, I love reading. I live in a natural park, so I spend a lot of time just staring at birds or goats that pass by. I also enjoy sports, hiking, and camping. **Marie:** That sounds wonderful. You said you like to read — what are you reading now? **Niki:** Right now, I’m reading a comic book about how to grow food organically. I’m trying to learn how to start my own veggie garden. **Nicole:** Is it *Heartstopper: Food Edition*? **Niki:** Haha, no! But I’ve seen that one. --- ### Adobo of the Day **Marie:** Speaking of food, our livestream is called *A Double Avocados*. Nicole and I are both from the Philippines, and *adobo* is our unofficial national dish. It’s hearty, delicious, and reminds us of home. So, Niki — what’s *your* adobo? What reminds you of home? **Niki:** That’s a tough one! Probably *spanakopita* — spinach, cheese, and pastry dough. My mom used to make it all the time, and I still make her recipe at home. It definitely reminds me of home. **Marie:** Now I’m hungry again! **Nicole:** We always end up talking about food. I think we just like food too much. --- ### Niki’s Journey into Tech **Marie:** Let’s switch gears. How did you get into tech? **Niki:** It’s been a long, non-traditional journey. I used to edit HTML and CSS as a teenager, but no one noticed there was potential there. My brother and dad worked in IT, and my mom worked with databases, but I studied International Relations instead — I wanted to solve problems, which is what we do in engineering too. During my studies in London, I volunteered in refugee camps in Greece and Serbia during the refugee crisis. There, I met a group building an open source app for managing donated items in warehouses. That experience *clicked* for me. After finishing my degree, I went to Makers Academy — a coding bootcamp in London — and that’s how I transitioned into software engineering. **Marie:** That’s awesome. I know a lot of people who went to Makers. It’s intense, right? **Niki:** Yeah, it’s really intense! The first month you learn command line, git, algorithms, and TDD. It moves *fast*. **Nicole:** I think that’s what makes bootcamps great. In uni, things are taught by academics, not people in tech. There’s often a lack of practicality. For me, the appeal of tech was building things I *need*, not just theory. If I’d realized that earlier, I would’ve switched to tech sooner. **Niki:** Exactly. I did my dissertation on gender bias in the tech industry, and part of that was about how we introduce young people to tech. If we showed how tech can help people and do good, more would be interested — especially those who don’t fit the stereotype. **Marie:** Yes! There’s a misconception that you need to know *everything* before you start, when most of us learn on the job. And there are so many roles in tech that aren’t just coding. --- ### CNCF and Sustainability **Marie:** Let’s talk about the CNCF and environmental sustainability. For those new to this — what are the main environmental concerns around cloud computing, and what challenges led to the creation of your group? **Niki:** The main issue is that we don’t have concrete ways to measure the carbon footprint of software. We lack precise metrics. To give context: Google created Kubernetes and donated it to the CNCF, which became part of the Linux Foundation. Over time, the CNCF formed different working groups — Special Interest Groups (SIGs) and later Technical Advisory Groups (TAGs), like ours. Our TAG focuses on helping developers monitor energy use and carbon emissions. We promote tools for energy monitoring and best practices for reducing carbon footprints throughout the software lifecycle — from development and testing to deployment. **Nicole:** When I first talked to Niki, I loved the idea because I focus on software performance. We usually think about performance in terms of speed or reliability — but what about environmental performance? How does our software perform as *citizens of the world*? **Marie:** That’s a great point. So, Niki, what are some recommended practices to reduce carbon footprint across the software lifecycle? **Niki:** For example, we use the Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA) in Kubernetes to “right-size” workloads — making sure we don’t request more CPU or memory than needed. Auto-scalers like that reduce waste. We’re also seeing cost optimization used as a *proxy* for sustainability. Cost and sustainability often align, though not always. Many people care about cost first, but in doing so, they indirectly reduce emissions too. --- ### Measuring Energy and Carbon Footprints **Nicole:** How do you even measure power consumption and sustainability? It seems complicated. **Niki:** It is. If you have access to hardware, you can plug in a power meter and use your provider’s carbon rate to calculate emissions. But in the cloud, you don’t have that visibility — you can’t just measure AWS’s electricity use! That’s where tools like **Kepler** come in. It stands for *Kubernetes-based Efficient Power Level Exporter*. It uses eBPF and machine learning to estimate energy usage from workloads, making it possible to track emissions even in the cloud. **Marie:** That’s fascinating. So now there’s an official standard for this, right? **Niki:** Yes! There’s a new ISO standard — the *Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) Specification* — developed by the Green Software Foundation. It provides a formula for measuring the carbon intensity of software, including runtime energy use and embedded carbon from hardware production. Hardware manufacturing actually accounts for the biggest share of emissions. --- ### Challenges and Community Work **Marie:** What are the main challenges your group faces? **Niki:** Everything is changing *so fast*. The standard was just released in April. There’s a steep learning curve, and a lot of collaboration required. As a maintainer, I focus on empowering contributors — making sure they have resources and support. It’s very community-oriented. All our meetings are open, all tools are open source, and everything we do is volunteer-driven. We’re figuring this out together. **Nicole:** And you’re using your nerdy powers for good! **Niki:** Exactly! --- ### Observability, Grafana, and Measuring Impact **Nicole:** Observability ties into this too. Measuring cost and environmental impact is another form of observability. But it’s tricky, because collecting metrics itself consumes resources. You have to balance measurement with minimizing overhead. **Niki:** Exactly. We’re even pausing parts of our project to automate processes and reduce the energy use of our own monitoring clusters. It’s all about course-correcting as we go. **Marie:** Do you have any Grafana dashboards for this? **Niki:** Yes! We’re using Grafana to visualize SCI components — energy in kilowatt-hours, emissions per region, and embodied carbon from hardware. We run tests on CNCF projects like *Falco* to track changes in carbon intensity per release. We’re still developing benchmarks, though. We’d love help from testing engineers who can advise on performance testing frameworks. --- ### Final Thoughts **Marie:** I’ve never thought about measuring carbon footprint before every release — it’s such a new and important perspective. **Nicole:** Maybe this should become another standard telemetry signal in observability — like logs, metrics, and traces. Imagine if environmental impact became a first-class citizen in monitoring systems. **Niki:** That would be amazing. And yes, everything we build is open source. Anyone can contribute. If anyone listening wants to help integrate carbon intensity into testing pipelines, we’d love that! **Marie:** I’ll definitely share this with testing communities. It shows how different disciplines intersect — not just coding, but testing, observability, and sustainability. **Niki:** Exactly. It’s the same challenge — different metrics. --- ### Advice for People Starting in Tech **Marie:** Before we wrap up, we always ask this: What’s one piece of advice you’d give to someone starting a career in tech? **Niki:** Be kind to yourself. When you’re facing something new or frustrating, take a break — it’s okay to walk away and come back later. Break problems down into small pieces, and remember: if someone else figured it out, so can you. **Marie:** I love that. It ties back to Nicole’s point about taking breaks. Thank you so much, Niki — this has been wonderful. **Nicole:** Yes, thank you! This was so insightful. **Marie:** And that’s it for today’s episode. We’ll be taking a short break next week, but we’ll be back with more soon. Thanks everyone for joining us! **All:** Bye!