[TCG Request] Cloud Native Sustainability

[saiyam1814]

Topic of this TCG

TCG Environmental Sustainability

What is your mission statement or objective for this new chapter?

As members of the cloud native sustainability community - formerly under the CNCF TAG Environmental Sustainability (now TAG Operational Resilience) we aim to create a dedicated Technical Community Group to continue advancing environmental sustainability practices, standards, and tooling within the cloud native ecosystem.
There is an existing community of 800+ members in the #tag-environmental-sustainability Slack channel and an active community page at community.cncf.io/cloud-native-sustainability/ that we intend to revive and build upon.

Our objectives are to:

• Drive adoption and contribution to sustainability-focused CNCF projects such as Kepler and Green
  Reviews
• Develop guidance and best practices for measuring and reducing the environmental impact of cloud
  native infrastructure
• Foster a community of practitioners passionate about sustainable cloud computing
• Create an accessible entry point for new contributors interested in environmental sustainability in
  cloud native
• Organize regular meetups, discussions, and knowledge-sharing sessions on cloud native sustainability
  topics

Tell us about yourself. List your name, email, company, GitHub URL, LinkedIn URL, and CNCF Slack workspace name (or if you need to be invited), and a required profile link on community.cncf.io

Saiyam Pathak
email - saiyam911@gmail.com
Company- Head of DevRel, vCluster and Founder, Kubesimplify
GitHub - https://github.com/saiyam1814
LinkedIN - https://www.linkedin.com/in/saiyampathak
CNCF community - https://community.cncf.io/u/mcb5ap/#/about
email - saiyam911@gmail.com

Saiyam is a Kubestronaut and active contributor to the cloud native ecosystem. He is currently a co-chair for TAG Operational Resilience (under which this sustainability work falls) and has been instrumental in driving the conversation to establish this TCG. He is the Co-chair for Kubecon India and has spoken at multiple KubeCon events and organizes cloud native community meetups.

Tell us about your co-organizers. List their information just as you did for yourself, or point to the GitHub issue where this was resolved in the TOC repository.

Niki Manoledaki
email: niki.manoledaki@gmail.com
company: Grafana Labs
GitHub: nikimanoledaki
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/niki-manoledaki-9b505111b/
community.cncf.io profile: https://community.cncf.io/u/m8ad3s/

Tell us about your co-organizers. List their information just as you did for yourself, or point to the GitHub issue where this was resolved in the TOC repository.

Niki is a CNCF Ambassador with deep domain expertise in cloud native sustainability. She builds communities around this domain, previously as part of the Environmental Sustainability TAG and currently through the Operational Resilience TAG. She is a long-term advocate and maintainer of Kepler, the CNCF Project for energy monitoring in Kubernetes. She is also a Green Software Foundation Champion and an organizer of the Cloud Native Barcelona meetup. As such, she will co-organize the TCG to build a stronger entry point for contributions to sustainability initiatives such as Green Reviews subproject and tooling such as Kepler.

Code of Conduct

• We agree to follow the CNCF Code of Conduct

Organizer affiliations

• I confirm on behalf of the all the TCG organizers that not more than half of us are from the same organization.

Inclusive

• We agree. To assure this, all TCG organizers have recently completed the Inclusive Open Source Community Orientation (LFC102) course

Vendor Neutral

• We have read what vendor-neutrality means, and agree that the main content of our meetups will remain vendor-neutral

Aim to have a diverse representation of speakers in your meetings.

• We will do our best to host diverse presenters throughout the year

[nikimanoledaki]

Thank you @saiyam1814 for getting the ball rolling with restarting the Environmental Sustainability TAG community as a TCG.

Context

The Environmental Sustainability TAG was a key entrypoint for contributors to projects like Kepler and the Green Reviews subproject. Unfortunately, contributions to both of these has been low without the community entrypoint that focuses on the environmental sustainability domain.

The EnvSus TAG helped as an entrypoint to welcome, onboard, and triage folks to contribute to these projects. Part of this impact was achieved by volunteers who do public advocacy through social media campaigns. The community who managed this aspect has moved on, and the social media accounts have been inactive. The new TCG would reopen these accounts, bring folks to engage with cloud sustainability, and provide continuity for such campaigns. This way, we can help onboard folks to subprojects and initiatives related to cloud sustainability, including the projects hosted by the Operational Resilience TAG.

Naming

The two names suggestions are: (1) CNCF Environmental Sustainability TCG (2) CNCF Cloud Native Sustainability TCG. Saiyam included both so that we can choose.

The first option offers more continuity with the previously named Environmental Sustainability TAG. Changing TAG to TCG is easy, meaning it will be easier to rename the existing social media accounts:

• LinkedIn (971 followers): https://www.linkedin.com/company/98554943
• YouTube (104 followers): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMOopJuyyIWB8vXGct1ffNw/videos
• Slack (800+ members): Unarchive #tag-environmental-sustainability and rename it to #tcg-environmental-sustainability
• Website: https://tag-env-sustainability.cncf.io/ -- we could change the domain from tag to tcg
• Logo: Change the logo from tag to tcg
• community.cncf.io (99 members): Rename the existing Cloud Native Sustainability TCG, which seems to be a naming error when we were running the Environmental Sustainability TAG: https://community.cncf.io/cloud-native-sustainability/

References

This is a similar effort to: [TCG Request] Cloud Native Platform Engineering Community cncf/communitygroups#491

Governance

While Saiyam and I are helping to kick things off, it would be great if we could hold elections to find engaged folks who are passionate about this topic and would like to be involved! Ideally we could have many organizers e.g the Platform Engineering TCG has 5

[leonardpahlke]

+1, i think TAG ENV did a good job at creating a group for folks driven by sustainability advocacy motives and translating this to engineering issues. After the restructuring we lost some of the momentum. Creating a dedicated TCG seems to be the right framing. +1 for CNCF Environmental Sustainability TCG.

Two things to from my side to take into consideration- Sovereignty & AI:

1. everything around Sovereignty which is about self hosted / controlled cloud environments on bare metal / controlled hw requires companies to deal with environmental boundaries (<= environmental and resource constraints are of immediate interest here)
2. AI workloads push parts of the Kubernetes ecosystem toward HPC-like patterns (accelerator-bound, resource-heavy, tightly scheduled), resource awareness are of immediate interest here.

At the same time the 'original' work of the TAG is still needed: decoding cloud resources better through observability, tuning environments to reduce environmental impact, and giving operators a clearer picture of what their platform actually costs in physical terms.

👍

[laurall974]

Hi @saiyam1814 and @nikimanoledaki 👋

I'd like to express my interest in contributing to and joining this TCG as I already mentioned to Niki.

I was already interested with the TAG Environmental Sustainability and found the work around measuring and reducing the environmental impact of cloud native infrastructure really valuable. I'm currently collaborating with Niki on a contribution to Kepler, and I'd love to get more formally involved through this TCG.

Happy to support the community efforts, join regular meetings, and contribute wherever useful.

Here's my info:
Name: Laura Llinares
Email: llinareslauraeve@gmail.com
Company: CERN
GitHub: laurall974
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laura-llinares

Looking forward to contributing!

[sunya-ch]

Huge +1 💚
I personally found that while the Operational Resilience TAG is excellent for high-level oversight, the scope is naturally very wide. This breadth makes it difficult to consistently gather the specific interest needed to drive deep technical work on sustainability.

Moving this to a dedicated Community Group (TCG) perfectly matches its purpose. It would provide the necessary focus and a clear entry point for contributors specifically interested in environmental impact, energy monitoring, and Green Reviews. Reviving this dedicated space is essential to regain the momentum we need to drive these initiatives.

Happy to help! ✋

[vallss]

Huge +1 for me too 💚
I agree with everything that's already been written in this thread but I'd like to add my 2cents on the advocacy perspective.

Creating a dedicated space for technical and advocacy activities again would really help to regain traction with all the work that has been done in previous years, which undoubtedly slowed down this past year (e.g. Cloud Native Sustainability Week and presence at events/conferences around Europe).

I'll be happy to help in any way I can 💯

[alolita]

I support this TCG request since Cloud Native Sustainability is an important part of observing and measuring environmental sustainability of cloud native infrastructure especially with the exponential growth of training and inference infrastructure. This TCG can help provide advancement of best practices, standards, and tooling for Green Reviews, energy utilization and environmental impact.

[guidemetothemoon]

Great initiative, +1 to creating this TCG. There are many engaged individuals in the community that are passionate about the topic of sustainability in the cloud native space and this topic is especially relevant nowadays. After the TAG Environmental Sustainability got discontinued there has been a constant need to create an arena where the discussions and the work around this topic will continue.

I will be very happy to see it happen 💚

[Saloni1814]

This is an amazing initiative - I have been part of the sustainability month, spoken a few times on kube-green and kepler, and would love to participate and contribute as well.