Real Time Cloud with Adrian Cockcroft

Chris Adams is joined by Adrian Cockcroft, former VP of Cloud Architecture Strategy at AWS, a pioneer of microservices at Netflix, and contributor to the Green Software Foundation’s Real Time Cloud project. They explore the evolution of cloud sustainability—from monoliths to microservices to serverless—and what it really takes to track carbon emissions in real time. Adrian explains why GPUs offer rare transparency in energy data, how the Real Time Cloud dataset works, and what’s holding cloud providers back from full carbon disclosure. Plus, he shares his latest obsession: building a generative AI-powered house automation system using agent swarms. Learn more about our people: Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | Website Adrian Cockcroft: LinkedIn | GitHub | Medium

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Resources: Serverless vs. Microservices vs. Monolith – Adrian's influential blog post [08:08] Monitorama 2022: Monitoring Carbon – Adrian’s talk at Monitorama Portland [25:08] Real Time Cloud Project – Green Software Foundation [30:23] Google Cloud Sustainability Report (2024) – Includes regional carbon data [33:39] Microsoft Sustainability Report [36:49] AWS Sustainability Practices & AWS Customer Carbon Footprint Tool [39:59] Kepler – Kubernetes-based Efficient Power Level Exporter [48:01] Focus – FinOps Sustainability Working Group [50:10] Agent Swarm by Reuven Cohen – AI agent-based coding framework [01:05:01] Claude AI by Anthropic [01:05:32] GitHub Codespaces [01:11:47] Soopra AI – Chat with an AI trained on Adrian’s blog [01:17:01]

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TRANSCRIPT BELOW: Adrian Cockcroft: We figured out it wasn't really possible to get real time energy statistics out of cloud providers because the numbers just didn't exist. It turns out the only place you can get real time numbers is on things that are not virtualized. Chris Adams: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables, brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discuss the latest news and events surrounding green software. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software. I'm your host, Chris Adams. Welcome to Environment Variables, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams. If you have worked in cloud computing for any length of time, then even if you do not know the name yet yourself, it's very likely that the way you design systems will have been influenced by my guest today, Adrian Cockcroft. When at Netflix, Adrian led the move to the cloud there helping, popularize many of the patterns we use when deploying applications ourselves to the cloud. And his name then became synonymous with serverless throughout the 2010s when he joined AWS first leading on open source engagement, and then as a VP focused on what we might refer to now as cloud sustainability. After leaving AWS, Adrian's kept his fingers in many pies, one of which is the Green Software Foundation's real time cloud project, an initiative to bring transparency and consistency to cloud emissions reporting. With the first dataset release from that project out the door, it seemed a good idea to invite him onto the show to see what's up. Adrian, thank you so much for joining us today. Can I give you a bit of time to tell us about yourself and what you are, what's what you're keeping? What's keeping you busy these days? I. Adrian Cockcroft: Yeah, it's great to see you and thanks also for your contributions to the project. We've had a lot of discussions over the last few years as we've worked on that tog