AI
Planet Labs: Kubernetes Processes 7 Petabytes of Earth Data Daily
Planet Labs operates over 200 satellites imaging Earth’s entire landmass every day, generating more than 7 petabytes of data annually. That volume only becomes useful when processed fast. Kubernetes handles the pipeline. Prometheus and Grafana cover observability. Argo and Kepler drive event-driven workflow orchestration that scales with each satellite downlink. The result: 30 terabytes processed daily through ML and AI pipelines, delivering near real-time insights to thousands of customers through the Planet Insights platform.
Stopping Deforestation with Daily Satellite Imagery
In Brazil, Planet Labs works with the federal police to fight illegal deforestation in the Amazon. Daily satellite imagery combined with AI-powered change detection has helped authorities collect nearly 3 billion euros in fines for illegal logging and mining. Over 100,000 users across 500 institutions now monitor 8.6 million square kilometers in near real-time. A separate hyperspectral satellite, Tanager One, detected over 5,000 methane plumes across nearly 3,000 sources globally in its first year, giving operators data to find and fix leaks.
CNCF Sustainability: Measure, Observe, Act, Report
Carbon reporting is moving toward mandatory status as governments include sustainability goals in public bids and cloud providers add carbon footprint tools. Within CNCF, TAG Operational Resilience turns that pressure into repeatable practices. The loop runs four steps: make energy and carbon as visible as cost and latency, convert signals into insights about waste, adjust scaling and scheduling policies, then right-size workloads and reduce idle capacity. The Sylva project under Linux Foundation Europe already applies this, using Kepler in Telco CNF deployments.
1KOMMA5 Heartbeat AI: 4.8 Million Grid Decisions Per Day
1KOMMA5° frames the energy transition as the same shift software teams already made: from monolithic power plants to millions of distributed home systems, each with solar panels, batteries, heat pumps, and EV chargers. Heartbeat AI orchestrates over 50,000 connected systems and makes 4.8 million optimization decisions every day. In the years since launch, the platform has saved over 2 million tons of CO2. The attack surface across millions of home devices is handled by Falco, detecting threats across the entire fleet.
Live Demo: A KubeCon Virtual Power Plant
Michael Reichenbach ran a live demo where attendees joined a KubeCon virtual power plant by scanning a QR code with their phones. Each phone acted as a node. When the simulated grid held surplus clean energy, attendees tapped charge to store it. When demand surged at end of day, they tapped discharge to return it. The demo showed how Heartbeat AI sends thousands of individual signals simultaneously. OpenTelemetry makes that observability possible at scale, described as the reason decentralization works at all.
Notable Quotes
The satellites generate more than 7 petabytes of data annually. Chris Holmes · ▶ 02:08
Just like a million microservices without Kubernetes is chaos, a million power plants without orchestration is Michael Reichenbach · ▶ 11:19
What you just did is what Heartbeat AI does 4.8 million times a day. Michael Reichenbach · ▶ 16:18
how green is your prompt? Faseela K · ▶ 17:12
Key Takeaways
- Planet Labs processes 30 terabytes daily through Kubernetes-based ML pipelines serving thousands of customers.
- Heartbeat AI makes 4.8 million grid optimization decisions per day across 50,000 home energy systems.
- CNCF TAG Operational Resilience provides a four-step loop for turning energy data into operational efficiency.
About the Speaker(s)
Faseela K is a cloud-native developer at Ericsson and a member of the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee. She focuses on 5G Telco and cloud-native technologies, driving 5G Telco requirements in the cloud-native ecosystem, and served as a KubeCon CloudNativeCon co-chair for this event.
Chris Holmes is a leading figure in the open-source and cloud-native geospatial community with over 20 years of experience building standards, software, and developer communities that shape how geospatial data is shared and accessed globally. He serves as VP of Product, Strategy and Partnerships at Planet Labs.
Michael Reichenbach is a Senior Platform Engineer at 1KOMMA5°, where he builds the developer platform behind Europe’s largest virtual power plant. His work supports software that manages over 50,000 decentralized energy systems and executes millions of optimization decisions daily.