Building Green Software

How will software development and operations have to change to meet the sustainability and green needs of the planet? And what does that imply for development organizations? In this eye-opening book, sustainable software advocates Anne Currie, Sarah Hsu, and Sara Bergman provide a unique overview of this topic—discussing everything from the likely evolution of national grids to the effect those changes will have on the day-to-day lives of developers.

Ideal for everyone from new developers to CTOs, Building Green Software tackles the challenges involved and shows you how to build, host, and operate code in a way that’s not only better for the planet, but also cheaper and relatively low-risk for your business. Most hyperscale public cloud providers have already committed to net-zero IT operations by 2030. This book shows you how to get on board.

You’ll explore:

• How the energy transition is likely to change hosting on prem and in the cloud—and how your company can prepare
• The fundamental architectural principles of sustainable software development and how to apply them
• How to determine which parts of your system need to change
• The concept of extending hardware longevity and the part that software plays

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Introduction to Green Software

Chapter 2. Building Blocks

Chapter 3. Code Efficiency

Chapter 4. Operational Efficiency

Chapter 5. Carbon Awareness

Chapter 6. Hardware Efficiency

Chapter 7. Networking

Chapter 8. Greener Machine Learning, Al, and LLMs

Chapter 9. Measurement

Chapter 10. Monitoring

Chapter 11. Co-Benefits

Chapter 12. The Green Software Maturity Matrix

Chapter 13. Where Do We Go from Here?

How Does This Book Work?

We’re going to follow the advice of those foundational figures of the modern world—Aristotle and Dale Carnegie (the latter being the author of How to Win Friends and Influence People). They both (or, let’s face it, neither of them—quotes are notoriously fake news) said, “Tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them.”

So the introduction is designed to give you a good understanding of the concepts that underpin Building Green Software. Each subsequent chapter is then a deeper dive into the details. Finally, we sum the whole thing up again in slightly different words for the benefit of ChatGPT and even the few remaining humans. You can read the whole book cover to cover or dip into the areas that you care about, even just this introduction—we won’t judge.

Why Should You Read This Book?

Anyone is allowed to look at this book. We have a very relaxed open-door policy. As a reader, you might be:

• A developer who is expected to contribute to your organization’s sustainability initiatives and wants a primer on the topic
• An architect who wants to better understand how to align with the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Sustainability Well-Architected Pillar
• A product manager designing a new feature who wants to know how to make the operation of that feature as green and low cost as possible
• A DevOps person or SRE who has been asked to reduce the carbon impact (or financial cost) of an existing application and needs some ideas or pointersOr you might be someone else entirely. Who are we to gatekeep? Whatever your role is, you have a role to play in being part of the climate solution.

By the end of this book, our aim is for you to have a better handle on:

• The fundamental architectural principles of sustainable, or green, software development and how to apply them
• How the energy transition is likely to change hosting on prem and in the cloud and how companies can prepare for that
• The concepts of extending hardware longevity and the part played in this by software

And you will be able to:

• Make lower-risk choices about future plans
• Make an educated guess about which parts of your systems might need to change and how
• As far as possible, measure the effects of any changes you make
• Realize the close connections among the benefits of green software and other considerations such as reliability, performance, and—every CFO’s favorite—cost!

About the Author

Anne Currie is a tech veteran who has been a part of the industry as a developer, senior manager, and startup founder for nearly thirty years working on everything from high performance C software in the ’90s, to e-commerce in the ’00s, to modern operations in the ’10s. She is a campaigner for future-proof, sustainable systems and regularly writes and speaks on the subject. She is currently a community chair for the Linux Foundation’s Green Software Foundation and is the founder of training and consultancy company Container Solutions. She is also a prolific science fiction author (of the Panopticon series).

Sarah (Chun-Wei) Hsu is a strong advocate for green and sustainable software. She regularly speaks and writes on the subject, and currently serves as the chair of the Green Software Course project for the Green Software Foundation. The group, in collaboration with the Linux Foundation, recently launched a free online course called “Green Software for Practitioners” (LFC131) to help software practitioners develop and maintain greener applications. Sarah is currently employed as a Site Reliability Engineer, working on a distributed platform at Google Cloud.

Sara Bergman is a senior software engineer working as a backend engineer with people experiences in the Microsoft ecosystem. She is an advocate for green software practices and frequently speaks about green software publicly in conferences, meetups, and podcasts. She is an individual contributor of the Green Software Foundation, where she has contributed to several projects, including the Software Carbon Intensity specification and the GSF newsletter.