Green software engineering

Assessing key trade-offs between carbon emissions and business objectives such as flexibility is still an uphill climb. Make the cloud green. Modern applications are almost always deployed over the cloud. But the exponential growth in cloud-based services has resulted in the rapid expansion of power-intensive data centers. To date, most efforts to make data centers green have focused on optimizing hardware by reducing the incidence of overheated servers and reducing carbon emissions by increasing the mix of renewable energy that powers them.

These techniques are helping to address the problem; however, including sustainable software interventions opens new opportunities to save energy. For example, eliminating duplicate copies of data or compressing data into smaller chunks would save energy. So would deploying graphics-processing units to manage workloads at the edge near the device or the end user , which creates efficiencies by breaking up large tasks into smaller ones and divvying them up among many processors.

Adopting greener server architectures will likely prove crucial for saving energy consumption. Using virtual servers, for example, would help companies scale up their servers on demand, conserving energy in enterprise data centers. Virtualization essentially enables the creation of multiple simulated environments or dedicated resources from a single, physical hardware system.

Containerization, essentially an improvement over virtual systems, is another option. Where serverless computing separates applications at the hardware level, containerization separates them at the operating-system level. Newer application architectures — such as serverless computing or functions-as-a-service FaaS — enable even more control over capacity and by extension, energy consumption. Serverless computing, for example, efficiently shares infrastructure resources by executing functions only on demand.

Large serverless computing service providers such as AWS Lambda and Microsoft Functions, for example, provide for continuous scaling with a pay-as-you-use cost model.

Whether it is the mobile phone that requires more efficient use of resources and computing power to save energy or the cloud data center where servers need to be optimized for energy consumption, the need for green software will continue to grow.

By including software in your sustainability efforts now, your company will have a head start in this important area. You have 1 free article s left this month. You are reading your last free article for this month. Subscribe for unlimited access. Create an account to read 2 more. Sustainable business practices. How Green Is Your Software? Read more on Sustainable business practices or related topic Technology and analytics.

Sanjay Podder leads technology innovation for growth markets at Accenture. With people in five continents and world-class clients, we are only as strong as the multicultural teams at the heart of our business. As a Software Engineering Director, you will play a critical and active role in the day-to-day operations. This is an excellent opportunity to be one of the key members of our Engineering team and position yourself for unique career growth opportunities.

Compensation plans, motivation, etc. Our people work remotely but with a consistent and robust culture that promotes diversity and teamwork. To continue being the leading software development company in Latin America, we want to ensure that every BairesDev member gets the best growth and professional development opportunities in a diverse, welcoming, and innovative environment.

Every BairesDev team member brings something unique to our company. We want to hear your story. Whatever sector, industry, role, technology — there is always something you can do to have an impact. As Green Software Engineers, we recognize there are many advantages to building sustainable applications. They are almost always cheaper, they are often more performant, they are often more resilient.

But the primary reason we are practicing Green Software Engineering is for sustainability, everything else is an added advantage. Here are a few examples of applying the principles of Green Software Engineering to some common application architectures:. Introduction Green Software Engineering is an emerging discipline at the intersection of climate science, software practices and architecture, electricity markets, hardware and data center design.

These eight principles form a shared understanding of what it means to be a Green Software Engineer independent of: Application domain. Organization size or type. Cloud vendor or self-hosted. Programming language or framework.