Sustainable Software
Learn how to define, build and run sustainable software applications.
Latest posts
VLC Energy Optimization With GPU
For the past few years, sustainable software engineering has arisen as one of the major topics in the daily discussions I have with software developers. Due to the advancements in technology, as well as the increasing awareness we share on climate change and the overall impact of tech on the environment, sustainable software engineering is now deeply integrated with innovation, user experience or application performance. This is the journey taken by the media player VLC, to adopt Sustainable Software Engineering practices and reduce their carbon emissions. In this post, I will share how you can reconcile hardware...
The Carbon Footprint Of AI
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to transform how we fight climate change. However, it also increasingly contributes to it: the carbon footprint of AI is growing exponentially. Bigger models, more data, and deployments contribute towards 'RedAI'. A nascent field called 'GreenAI' is focused on measuring & mitigating this.
Achieving 2030 Sustainable Development Goals using Cloud
Developer community has opportunity to help the world achieve 2030 UN Sustainable Development Goals by adopting Sustainable Software Engineering practices as well as building applications that have positive first and second order effects on one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals.
Reducing the carbon and financial cost of your cloud applications
In my job as a cloud architect working with large enterprises, there has always been a specific “moment of truth” when the customer realizes that cloud costs are something that needs to be monitored daily to avoid unpleasant surprises with the end of the month’s bill. Enterprises can take several steps toward understanding cloud costs and avoid surprises: The main goal of cloud governance is how to bring down the monthly billing or to keep it level, while absorbing the usual growth or the new projects. But what if we looked at cost optimization from a different angle? At Microsoft we can calculate the sav...
Carbon-Aware Kubernetes
If you are running microservices these days there is a high probability you are managing them with Kubernetes. Kubernetes makes container management easy and its websites boasts of “Planet Scale”, “Never Outgrow”, and “Run Anywhere” as some of its key features. As a Sustainable Software Engineer, I read those phrases as more of a warning of runaway infrastructure that consumes with no boundary or regard to the impact on the planet or checkbook. The good news is that Kubernetes is built in a way that it can make carbon-aware decisions balanced against the technical requirements of the system. This post will step t...
How Demand Shifting Compute Accelerates Our Energy Transition to Renewables
The world has been busy building renewable energy these last few years. Since the costs of solar and wind energy have dropped below the costs of operating existing fossil fuel plants, particularly coal, wind, and solar have grown to contribute significant portions of electricity consumption globally. These renewable energy sources create windows of low cost, low emissions power when they generate. In any given place, renewable generation will rise and fall depending on the weather and time of day, but there will always be renewable generation somewhere in the world. If a region has a large supply of renewables, ...
How to measure the power consumption of your backend service
The second principle of Sustainable Software Engineering is to build energy efficient applications. The very first steppingstone in that direction is to measure the energy your application consumes. This post will answer the question "what is the best way to measure the energy consumption of your backend service?".
Measuring Your Application Power and Carbon Impact (Part 1)
Overview of using the built in Energy Estimation Engine to estimate the carbon impact of your application.
Network Optimization for Sustainable Software Engineering
Designing network infrastructure upfront can reduce customer’s carbon footprint as well as the carbon footprint of their cloud provider. This also represents a paradigm shift in how cloud services are designed, planned, and deployed. Just like designing with accessibility in mind became a common software development life cycle.