Building a Carbon and Price-Aware Kubernetes Scheduler, with Dave Masselink

In this episode of KubeFM, host Bart interviews Dave Masselink, founder of Compute Gardener, about using Kubernetes to scale workloads responsibly by reducing energy consumption. Dave shares emerging Kubernetes tools like Kepler, Cloud Native PG, and KubeEdge, and discusses resources for learning about them. He explains his journey into cloud-native technologies and the environmental challenges posed by data centers' energy consumption, which led him to develop the Compute Gardener scheduler. Dave details how the scheduler integrates carbon awareness and electricity price optimization into Kubernetes scheduling decisions, using real-time carbon intensity data and time-of-use pricing. He also discusses the technical implementation of the scheduler as a Kubernetes plugin, the challenges of estimating energy consumption, and how developers can configure pods to be carbon aware, projecting significant carbon reductions for deferrable workloads. The conversation also covers the broader ecosystem of carbon-aware computing initiatives and future developments like carbon credit integration and cross-cluster scheduling, as well as how to get involved with Compute Gardener.