Milan in-person and virtual meetups wrap-up: a new green and inclusive community was born
In this blog post we’ll share some highlights and post-event reflections from this year’s Cloud Native Sustainability Week Milan meetups.
For the second Italian edition of this event, we brought together developers, CEOs, advocates, graphic designers and many other people with different backgrounds and knowledge. Yet everyone had a common starting point: we have a responsibility to share information and best practices to live in a more sustainable, inclusive and accessible Planet.
The event(s): September 30th meetup
We kicked off on September 30th with an in-person meetup and three talks.
Haydée Longo, Lex4all lawyer and Vice president @Fe.D.Man., presented her talk “Navigating the Regulatory Landscape: The Impact of Digital Accessibility and Sustainability Legislation on the Cloud Native Industry”. Haydée’s talk was based on the fact that talking about sustainability doesn’t just mean focusing on environmental impact but also on human rights, workers’ rights, D&I - Diversity and Inclusion and also digital accessibility. She introduced topics like the European Accessibility Act (EAA) and the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and how these two directives relate to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The EAA emphasizes the importance of designing applications and websites to be more accessible from the first steps and aims to provide legal protection for users by defining the link between inaccessible products and discrimination. The CSRD aims to make the development of products and applications more transparent and asserts the importance of using renewable energy to support business activities.
Next up, Paola Annis, Engineering manager @ Microsoft, presented her talk “Finops and Sustainability”. In this talk, Paola reflected on the characteristics of the Cloud Native world and why it’s crucial for developers and engineers to know that for every feature added, there is a cost and that FinOps principles help to better manage these costs. In the Cloud, being efficient means doing more while consuming less energy because energy is a proxy for carbon emissions and this connection leads us to the concept of GreenOps. In fact, being able to manage our workloads in a more sustainable way (emitting less carbon) is also linked to a cost reduction. Paola introduced the Green Software Foundation, some of the green software principles such as carbon awareness and how to apply them using carbon intensity APIs, etc.( Watttime & Electricity maps).
Then, Graziano Casto, Developer Relations Engineer @ Mia-Platform, closed the meetup with his talk “An open-source first step to greenify your cloud native environment”. In his talk, Graziano shared his experience as a developer who actually took the time to understand the impact of the feature he and his team were developing. He talked about the importance of collecting data, trying to define a baseline of how much energy we’re using and how dirty it is, knowing what kind of hardware our software is running on and measuring our impact. Graziano also went into detail about managing our environments (local, production, test, etc.) in a more environmentally and economically sustainable way, which basically means turning them off when we don’t need them! He talked about Kube-green, an open source project aimed at reducing the carbon footprint of clusters.
The event(s): October 7th virtual meetup
One week after the in-person meetup, the virtual meetup took place with a total of five talks!
Valeria Salis, Software developer - Public speaker & meetup organizer - Tech Lead @ WG Sustainability Advocacy, started off with her talk “Digital Impact: Considerations on the Responsible Use of Technological Innovations”. Valeria brought up a new perspective on technology and its impact: what would happen if we lived in a world where we had to pay for the environmental impact of every technology-related activity we do such as sending an email, watching our favorite TV show, writing a post on our favorite social media website? She briefly introduced the environmental impact of generative AI and how the easy and accessible use of such carbon-emitting tools is to be worried about. In fact, technology should help people but tools need to be used in a responsible and thoughtful way because behind our screens lies the consumption of energy, water and many other resources.
Next up, Paolo Filippelli, Senior DevOps @ Radicalbit, presented his talk “Green Cloud, Green Code: let’s explore the green potential of Cloud Native technologies”. Paolo talked about green software principles and SCI - Software Carbon Intensity but also how to apply green strategies to CI/CD pipelines, to our code, to our deployment phases and how to monitor the energy consumption of our software. He introduced some tools like the Carbon Aware SDK and the Impact Framework, Eco CI and GreenFrame CLI, dive and slim to generate minimal OCI images, Knative and KEDA but also Kube-green. He concluded by pointing out the importance of contributing and participating in communities and non-profit organizations, as the development of more sustainable software and applications is becoming increasingly important in the industry.
But during this virtual event we also talked about hardware! In fact, Andrea Bordoni, Head of Technology & Digital Transformation @Etesian SpA, presented his talk “The Challenge of Eco-friendly Computers”. Andrea pointed out the fact that today it seems impossible to live without electronic devices, but this doesn’t mean that we have the right to waste them, because each device was produced using resources such as water, rare minerals and others. For a more environmentally sustainable future, we need to start taking this into consideration and think twice before buying another smartphone or PC when we already have one that is still working. He shared some numbers not only related to the emissions but also to water consumption and how long products should last from a climate perspective in order to amortize their environmental impact.
For the fourth talk we returned to software and ESG issues with Francesco Fullone, Sustainability Designer / Green Software advocate, and his talk “IT Sustainability: from the environmental impact of software to the social impact”. As the title suggests, Francesco shared some thoughts on the real meaning of “being sustainable”, which isn’t just about being efficient, using renewable energy, etc., but also about working towards accessible technology, caring for invisible communities, the right to repair, slowing down and creating less, etc. He introduced the concept of ESG which refers to the environmental, social and governance aspects and sustainability is the intersection of these three terms and areas. He talked about business ethics (DEI & AUI) and the link between emissions reduction and financial efficiency. Francesco concluded with CDR - Corporate Digital Responsibility and its objectives, reminding everyone that every year the Earth Overshoot Day comes earlier, therefore we need to be aware of the impact of our choices starting as soon as possible.
The last talk of the day “The good, the Bad, the Native” was presented by Gregorio Palamà, DevOps and Cloud Engineer @ Lutech, Google Cloud Champion Innovator, Community Manager @ GDG Pescara. Gregorio reiterated the general concept of Cloud Native application and the fact that this type of technology allows us to achieve efficiency, scalability, reliability and cost efficiency. He introduced the ecosystem of JVM microservices frameworks and how he worked with GraalVM which offers a good way to optimize your application and transform it into a native executable that will guarantee low startup times, low resource consumption, and high performance. He also gave a demo and showed the results achieved in terms of execution speed and so on.
Conclusion
During the two events we organized for Cloud Native Sustainability Week 2024, we had the opportunity to discuss and share different points of view on the broad topic of IT and tech sustainability.
We are proud of the Italian community we have created and these events were actually the start of the Green Software Italia community.
A big thank you to the organizers:
- Michel Murabito, CNCF Ambassador - KCD Italy Organizer - Developer Advocate @Mia-Platform
- Valeria Salis, Software developer - Public speaker & meetup organizer - Tech Lead @ WG Sustainability Advocacy
- Ludovica Bonaldo, UX/UI Designer and official Graphic designer for Cloud Native Sustainability Week 2024
- Sara Trappetti, CNCF Ambassador - Head of Marketing at SIGHUP
- Andrea Saltarello, CEO @ Improove, Professor @ GSoM Politecnico di Milano, Co-founder Accessibility Days APS
- Andrea Bordoni, Head of Technology & Digital Transformation @Etesian SpA
- Mara Marzocchi, Codemotion Co-founder
A very big thank you to Roberto Freato and Retex, our location sponsor, Jug Milano, Mia-Platform and Improove for supporting these two events.
Last but not least, thank you to the TAG Environmental Sustainability for organizing this annual event and if you’re interested in contributing, join the Slack channel #tag-environmental-sustainability and join one of the regular meetings!