Berlin Buzzwords 2026 - Julien Nioche on Greenops and new open source project SPRUCE

This is a LIVE discussion with Julien Nioche, the creator of SPRUCE, open source greenops framework. We recorded LIVE at Berlin Buzzwords 2026.

Cameraman is Zoom's AI and it goes a little crazy at times zooming on Julien and zooming back out. As usual, audio version will be available. Go to https://www.vectorpodcast.com/

He gave a talk about SPRUCE at the conference: https://2026.berlinbuzzwords.de/session/spruce-it-up-open-source-greenops-at-scale/

Timcodes:

00:00 Intro

00:16 Julien's background

01:36 What is SPRUCE

2:51 Greenops vs FinOps

6:09 Reasons cloud providers won't go deeper on greenops

7:09 Ways to deploy SPRUCE

15:06 Cultural shift needed for Greenops

17:39 How to measure impact of AI agents and LLMs

Shownotes:

- SPRUCE and green ops: https://opensourcegreenops.cloud/latest/

- SPRUCE on GitHub: https://github.com/digitalpebble/spruce

- Julien's company: https://digitalpebble.com/

- Apache StormCrawler: https://stormcrawler.apache.org/ and GitHub: https://github.com/apache/stormcrawler

- SPRUCE is based on Apache Spark: https://spark.apache.org/

- "AI is here - time to throw away our search engines?" panel hosted by Charlie Hull at Berlin Buzzwords 2026: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StaPk0k-52Y

- Estimate and track the environmental footprint of GenAI models at inference. Ecologits: https://ecologits.ai/latest/

- Evaluate the environmental impact of digital technologies across organizations. Boavizta: https://boavizta.org/en