Green Coding: Creating sustainable software for a greener future
According to a study by the University of Bristol, software development is responsible for approximately 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions, which is equivalent to the emissions from the entire aviation industry. Moreover, the International Energy Agency predicts that energy consumption by data centers will triple by 2030, posing a significant challenge to reducing carbon emissions. Interestingly, Accenture estimates that 85% of carbon emissions generated by running enterprise software systems can be impacted by application design and development.
In response to this challenge, green or sustainable coding has emerged as one of the most important practices to reduce software development's environmental impact. Green coding involves optimizing code to minimize energy consumption and resource usage, promoting sustainable development practices, and using low-power hardware or energy-efficient infrastructure cloud infrastructure.?
Developers can implement several best practices to achieve energy efficiency, such as using appropriate algorithms, optimizing database queries, and avoiding unnecessary processing. There are also many new metrics and tools that measure progress, identify opportunities for improvement, ensure compliance, encourage accountability, and facilitate decision-making.
Among other tools, CAST Software presents HIGHLIGHT-Green software insight (CAST Highlight - Capabilities (castsoftware.com))
1.??????Green impact scores - Automatically derives scores at both portfolio and application levels, with trends over time
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2.??????Green deficiencies - Patterns found in the source code that contribute to excess use of resources/energy, with suggested remediation and effort estimates.
3.??????Automated recommendation - Prioritized actions across all applications, including quick wins and actions with the biggest impact
By embracing green software development practices, developers can significantly contribute to environmental sustainability. From optimizing energy efficiency and resource management to adopting sustainable development practices and promoting user education, every step counts in reducing the carbon footprint of software solutions. Let's join hands to create a greener and more sustainable future through responsible software development.
Senior Director @ CAST | Modernization consulting | Cloud Architectures
1 年Subhendu Bhattacharya Very well articulated. We are seeing an increased focus on the Green coding initiatives across customers and across geographies. The insights from CAST Highlight are helping these customers to monitor, benchmark and shift left of the green deficiencies.
Thanks Subhendu for this important and relevant post. Well written. Green IT and Sustainability are important considerations for software design. IBM is releasing an asset soon to systemically implement in our client engagements.
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1 年Green application development is indeed becoming, slowly but surely, a new focus area. Analyzing source code of software applications allows to "shift left" and detect improvement opportunities for applications even before they reach production. Common sense says that one should first investigate the servers, the storage and network equipments in those greedy datacenters. But you know, hardware is here only to host those business applications. And if these applications are less energy hungry, they will eventually need less powerful hardware, for a given users workload. ... which made David Linthicum say, in his great book "An Insider's Guide to Cloud Computing" just published, "There are huge sustainability gains that can be made here (i.e., Green application development) that will also lower your cloud computing bill.” ! BTW, major cloud providers today (Azure, AWS and Google Cloud) are positively contributing to sustainability, by providing CO2 footprint measures to their clients, as part of their observability services. These measures, combined with CAST insights, allow monitor trending and proactively focus on energy-hungry systems that need customer's attention.