Sustainable Kubernetes at scale: Cost & Carbon Optimization

Dynatrace Cost & Carbon Optimization supports carbon emissions reduction initiatives and regulatory requirements with analytics and recommendations that drive informed optimization decisions at data center, host, architecture, and code levels. You can now measure the energy consumption and carbon footprint of your Kubernetes infrastructure and use this information to track sustainability goals and optimize energy, costs, and waste.

Kubernetes has rapidly established itself as a cornerstone technology for deploying and managing applications at scale. It's designed to streamline operations and offer considerable potential for fostering carbon-friendly applications by including automated deployment and dynamic scalability, which allow for efficient resource allocation and significant savings through optimized container orchestration. With its intelligent provisioning of containers, Kubernetes aims to optimize the use of underlying resources, ultimately leading to better infrastructure utilization compared to traditional, often over-provisioned, approaches.

However, the increasing complexity of Kubernetes environments necessitates active and diligent management of their carbon footprint. Mainly because, despite their promise of efficiency, if not properly managed, Kubernetes environments can paradoxically lead to excessive carbon emissions.

Measure Kubernetes energy consumption and carbon footprint

With the latest release of Cost & Carbon Optimization, Dynatrace now provides reporting and analytics for your Kubernetes infrastructure, allowing you to understand the carbon footprint (both energy and carbon emissions - CO2 equivalent) of Kubernetes clusters, namespaces, and nodes. You can now measure and determine whether the utilization of Kubernetes resources justifies their carbon footprint, identify anomalies and trends, and compare this against emissions from physical or single-use host infrastructure to ensure that migrating workloads to Kubernetes provides an appropriate sustainability return on investment.

Supporting all modes of Kubernetes monitoring, whether deployed in the cloud or on-premises, Cost & Carbon Optimization offers the following capabilities for your Kubernetes environment:

• Understand the energy and carbon footprint of Kubernetes clusters and namespaces with the new Kubernetes explorer interface.
• Highlight optimization opportunities by correlating the carbon footprint with the size of the cluster or node via Kubernetes metrics.
• Confirm if sustainability or optimization efforts deliver the assumed results with automatic time-period comparisons.
• Inspect resource requests and limits, quotas, or idle workloads/jobs that reserve resources but run infrequently with one-click contextual navigation into the Kubernetes app.
• Create custom reports using Notebooks or Dashboards
• Calculate your carbon footprint without installing additional complex Kubernetes plug-ins or configurations by leveraging information from your existing Dynatrace Kubernetes platform monitoring.
• Provide accurate measurements by using certified energy and carbon calculation algorithms.

Why bother with setting up a sustainable Kubernetes environment?

If you already use Kubernetes, or plan to migrate workloads to Kubernetes, you should consider using Dynatrace Cost & Carbon Optimization today to unlock the following benefits:

• Energy use is a direct driver of cost: Cloud infrastructure costs are largely driven by energy consumption. CPU, memory, storage, and networking all consume power, and cloud providers factor this into pricing. By measuring energy usage, you can track the underlying metric that influences cost.
• Carbon footprint adds environmental context: Carbon footprint translates energy consumption into environmental impact. This is especially valuable for organizations with sustainability goals or Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) reporting requirements.
• Opportunities to align cost and environmental optimization: Inefficient clusters, namespaces, and nodes that consume more energy (and thus emit more carbon) are often the ones driving up cloud costs. Identifying high-carbon workloads can highlight areas for both cost and environmental optimization.

Practical examples

Once activated, you can easily identify the Kubernetes clusters and namespaces with the highest energy consumption and carbon emissions, and correlate this with additional metrics from Dynatrace Kubernetes monitoring to identify the most costly and underutilized Kubernetes resources. Drill down from the Cost & Carbon Optimization app into Kubernetes to get more information on resource requests and limits, quotas, or idle workloads/jobs that reserve resources but run infrequently. Once identified, you can easily leverage this information to optimize your carbon and costs.

Use our ready-made dashboards to gain a deeper understanding of the data over time and identify anomalies that require further investigation. A large spike in energy and carbon usage could be a normal side effect of increased usage; it could also signal a change based on automatic scaling or inappropriate resource provisioning.

But why stop with focusing on your existing infrastructure only? Measure and compare carbon emissions from single-use servers against Kubernetes infrastructure and ensure that migration efforts meet the desired sustainability goals. You can even start gamifying this and challenge your engineering teams to develop solutions that delight end-users and the environment.

Start optimizing costs & carbon

If you're already monitoring your Kubernetes infrastructure with Dynatrace, measuring Kubernetes energy consumption and emissions is as simple as installing and activating the Cost & Carbon Optimization app from Dynatrace Hub.

The app is available to all Dynatrace SaaS customers and leverages capabilities outlined in your rate card, supporting all Dynatrace Kubernetes monitoring modes. Are you interested in learning more? Do you know that Dynatrace Cost & Carbon Optimization is certified for accuracy and transparency? Have a look at our documentation and learn how to calculate and monitor your IT costs and carbon footprint. Then use the link below to install Cost & Carbon Optimization in your Dynatrace environment.