Sustainable Code: A Look at Green Software Practices

Monday - December 18 2023, 19:26 UTC - 11 months ago

Green software is an effort to make software development more energy efficient and reduce carbon emissions. It typically involves using efficient algorithms and taking energy efficiency considerations into account during the entire software development cycle. The three pillars of green software are energy efficiency, hardware efficiency, and carbon awareness. Additionally, instituting green software requires a shift in mindset to create the greatest strides in sustainability.

After years of committing to sustainable practices in his personal life from recycling to using cloth-based diapers, Asim Hussain, currently the director of green software and ecosystems at Intel, began to ask questions about the practices in his work: software development. Developers often asked if their software was secure enough, fast enough, or cost-effective enough but, Hussain says, they rarely considered the environmental consequences of their applications. Hussain would go on to work at Intel and become the executive director and chairperson of the Green Software Foundation, a non-profit aiming to create an ecosystem of people, tooling, and best practices around sustainable software development.

"What we need to do as software developers and software engineers is we need to make sure that it is emitting the least amount of carbon for the same amount of value and user functionality that we're getting out of it," says Hussain.

The three pillars of green software are energy efficiency, hardware efficiency, and carbon awareness. Making more efficient use of hardware and energy consumption when developing applications can go a long way toward reducing emissions, Hussain says. And carbon-aware computing involves divestment from fossil fuels in favor of renewable energy sources to improve efficiency without compromising performance.

Often, when something is dubbed "green," there is an assumption that the product, application, or practice functions worse than its less environmentally friendly version. With software, however, the opposite is true.

"Being green in the software space means being more efficient, which translates almost always to being faster," says Hussain. "When you factor in the hardware efficiency component, oftentimes it translates to building software that is more resilient, more fault-tolerant. Oftentimes it also translates then into being cheaper." .

Instituting green software necessitates not just a shift in practices and tooling but also a culture change within an enterprise. While regulations and ESG targets help to create an imperative, says Hussain, a shift in mindset can enable some of the greatest strides forward.

"If there's anything we really need to do is to drive that behavior change, we need to drive behavior change so people actually invest their time on making software more energy efficient, more hardware efficient, or more carbon aware." .