The Paris Climate Accords outline the link between economic activity, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and the impacts of climate change. GHG emissions, primarily made from Carbon Dioxide, are released during the combustion of fossil fuels to produce electricity. To reach net zero goals, we will first identify how to reduce the environmental footprints of increasingly large data centers and then help the community take action to mitigate these footprints.
References:
- https://www.iea.org/reports/net-zero-by-2050
- https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/US-Long-Term-Strategy.pdf
- https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2022/05/23/what-you-need-to-know-about-net-zero
This TAG's goal is to advocate for, develop, support, and help evaluate environmental sustainability initiatives in cloud native technologies. This TAG will identify values and possible incentives for service providers to reduce their consumption and carbon footprint through cloud native tooling.
We recognize that:
- the trade off between reducing resource consumption and higher performance is hard to balance
- there is a lack of well supported and documented approaches for evaluating the environmental sustainability of cloud native projects in their default or optimized configurations
- Identify, define, and develop tooling to assess and improve environmental sustainability approaches, including
- Quantify the energy consumption of cloud native implementations individually as well as in common integration patterns
- Recommendations and strategies to develop, package, distribute, deploy, and operate cloud native implementations to reduce energy consumption and carbon as well as the various environments they operate in and which impact their consumption
- Capabilities, benchmarks, and processes to evaluate technological and architectural health of projects
- Community outreach and engagement on the work of this TAG
- Collaboration with other environmental or sustainability organizations, initiatives, activities, and efforts that may fall outside of the CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation)
- Form an umbrella organization beyond the CNCF
- Establish a compliance and standards body beyond the CNCF space
- Evaluate individual company infrastructures
- Focus outside of cloud native technologies, according to the CNCF Cloud Native definition
- Landscape for carbon and energy efficiency in the form of metrics, measurements, and management techniques
- Environmental sustainability recommendations and optimizations to new and existing projects within the landscape
- Reports on gaps in the environmental sustainability coverage of the landscape
- Reviews, inputs, and recommendations for proposed projects for CNCF hosting and advancement
- Suggestions for improvements for CNCF internal processes, for example, education for sustainability
- Education - audience is end users, developers, stakeholders
- Project intelligence - audience is TOC/CNCF Community
- External collaboration - organizations, initiatives, activities, and efforts outside of CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation)
Environmental Sustainability TAG operations are consistent with standard TAG operating guidelines provided by the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee TOC.