Open Source is Solving a Problem We Ignore

We talk a lot about scaling software.
But we rarely talk about what that scale actually costs.

Today, almost everything we build is designed to be constantly online, syncing in the background, refreshing dashboards, running CI pipelines, keeping containers alive, serving APIs 24/7. Even when nobody is actively using the product, the infrastructure behind it is still consuming compute, electricity, cooling, and hardware resources.

And with AI accelerating infrastructure growth, this problem is becoming impossible to ignore.

What’s interesting is that a large part of this isn’t really a hardware problem.
It’s a software design problem.

Over the years, we’ve normalized inefficient patterns like idle workloads, over-engineered systems, unnecessary cloud communication, and architectures that quietly increase infrastructure consumption at scale. The industry became very good at shipping fast, but not necessarily at building efficiently.

This talk explores how open source communities and infrastructure engineers are approaching this differently. Across modern data centers and large-scale infrastructure, open-source tools & initiatives are already helping reduce power consumption, optimize workloads, improve hardware utilization, and avoid unnecessary compute usage altogether.

Not through sustainability buzzwords.
Through practical engineering.

We’ll discuss how infrastructure efficiency impacts real-world energy consumption, why local-first and edge-native systems matter more than ever, and why the next big shift in computing may not come from building larger data centers but from writing software that simply needs less infrastructure to begin with.

Because sometimes, the most efficient request is the one that never leaves the machine.

And quietly, open source has already been building toward that future.

• Discover open-source tools reducing infrastructure power consumption around Data centers and server plants.

• Learn how workload consolidation and efficient scheduling reduce wasted compute

• Understand how local-first and edge-native systems reduce unnecessary cloud usage

• Learn practical software engineering practices that reduce infrastructure waste

• Explore open-source initiatives building sustainable infrastructure and green computing

• Understand how software decisions directly affect electricity, cooling, and resource usage