Measuring Sustainability via Project Kepler, with Niki Manoledaki

GreenOps prioritizes operational efficiency and resource optimization to reduce the environmental impact of cloud-native technologies, frequently utilizing cost as a proxy metric for sustainability. Niki Manoledaki, a staff platform engineer at Grafana Labs and core maintainer of Project Kepler, highlights how this open-source tool enables granular energy consumption tracking by mapping power metrics to Kubernetes containers and pods. While cloud virtualization and hardware abstraction layers complicate direct energy measurements, Project Kepler provides essential estimates that allow organizations to align their infrastructure with sustainability goals. The rise of AI workloads further shifts the focus toward token-based usage metrics, necessitating specialized models and improved observability to balance high-performance demands with environmental responsibility. Ultimately, achieving sustainability in modern computing requires navigating the trade-offs between precise measurement and practical estimation to drive meaningful reductions in carbon footprints across complex, multi-layered systems.