Zombies? Yup, zombies. Zombies are servers which aren’t doing useful work. They’re everywhere, costing money, eating electricity, and belching carbon. And they’re useless! Sadly, the cloud has not helped our zombie problem, and even Kubernetes hasn’t helped.

One of the reasons zombies don’t get switched off is that no one knows they’re there. So how do we get rid of our pesky zombies? In this talk, Holly will explain the underlying technical and organisational factors that lead to zombies, and introduce a range of real-world zombie-hunting strategies. These include getting to grips with elasticity and utilisation, LightSwitchOps, FinOps, and the eco-monkey (it’s like the chaos monkey, but greener). Technologies covered include absurdly simple scripts, DailyClean, Kruize Autotune, and Backstage.