Hey there,

As a tradition of this podcast notes, let me update you what I learned about Green Software Foundation today.

Green Software Foundation

They are non-profit organization launched in May 2021. For March 2024, they have 61 member organizations and 1098 individuals. They are subpart of Linux Foundation.

I realized an interesting thing about launching partners. There are 4 companies there: 2 Microsoft and 2 consulting company. Let me quote from Accenture website:

Other steering members are: Avanade, BCG-X, Intel, NTT Data, Siemens and UBS.

And they have great projects ongoing, including this podcast :)

We also have a new guest, which suppose to be familiar name for GSF. But as a rule of thumb, every individual is a book to read.

Anne Currie

She2 is an engineer, a manager, startup founder, trainer, science-fiction writer and painter as well. Let’s listen how she described herself in podcast:

Hi, Chris. Thanks for that. My name is Anne Currie. I am one of the community co-chairs of the Green Software Foundation. I'm also the CEO of a training and consultancy company in green software called Strategically Green. And as Chris said, things that I'm doing at the moment, I've been writing the last year, I've been writing with, with two co-authors, also from the Green Software Foundation, Sara Bergman and Sarah Hsu on the O'Reilly book, Building Green Software, which will be out next month. So that's all very exciting.

Podcast Notes

Surprisingly Successful KPI: Sustainability

Referenced to the new survey3 from Climate Action Tech, here is the quick conversation from the podcast:

Chris Adams: …this is the Green Ops survey results, we'll share the link to it, but the short version is, and the headline is basically, "if you want to save money in enterprise, turns out that sustainability as a KPI is more important than cost." This is one of the key findings of the recent GreenOps survey that was actually part funded by the Climate Action Tech Mini, Mini-grant fund that was running through this.

One of the questions there, I, I, I still come back to it because I think it's very interesting. We ask people to rank in order of importance, cost, performance, sustainability, reliability, and security. So you actually, you couldn't just say, you have to actually literally drag and drop these things in the order of importance that you thought it would be. And I thought it was really interesting because the number one item that came out was security, which is interesting, but also very valid and it is, I suppose, you know, what a lot of people and organizations do you focus on. Second was reliability, which is, you know, understandable as well. Third was sustainability. And then came performance and the last, the very last item was cost, which was fascinating to me because to a lot of people, they would assume that cost is the most important thing.

As you can see from the survey blog post, they also published all the dataset and questions for the sake of transparency.

In the interests of transparency and supporting further research, we have made a full snapshot of the dataset and original questions available on the CAT website for your own analysis. Follow the link to download: CAT-GreenOpsSurvey-2024.zip (XLS).

Alignment of Sustainability, Security, and Resilience

And Anne continued as an answer to KPI question by giving an overview from security perspective:

Anne Currie: One of the interesting things here is that all of these things are very aligned, aren't they? That being sustainable does cut your costs and it does improve your security because an awful lot at first stage of being sustainable is to turn off machines that you don't really need anymore. And those machines are your security holes. So, you know, there's a massive alignment between security and sustainability and resilience and sustainability as well. You know, the resilience of auto scaling rather than the resilience of hot backups or cold backups, it's more resilient and it's more efficient. So it's kind of like all of these things are highly aligned, but I guess it all comes down to that whole thing about extrinsic versus intrinsic motivations, isn't it? That people like to feel that they're doing good at the same time as they're doing other things.

Cost as a proxy for carbon - the inconvenient truth

Referencing to another blog post5 Chris has another question:

“Many technology-related articles and major cloud service providers promote the idea that ‘Cost is a proxy for carbon emissions’. This suggests that optimising and reducing your cloud costs can lead to increased sustainability. But is this entirely true?”

Chris Adams: when is cost a good proxy for carbon? And when is cost a bad proxy for carbon?

Anne Currie: I have very strong opinions on this, Chris. I think that at some stages, it's an excellent proxy for carbon. And at some stages, it's gone beyond. It's not really a great proxy anymore. So it depends is the answer. So I'm going to, I'm going to pull in one of our new projects at the Green Software Foundation that I'm the lead on, which is the Green Software Maturity Matrix, which is about the fact that there are kind of, we're all at a different stage.

Most of us are at stage one. We haven't really started down the road of becoming green in our, in our systems. And at that stage, cost is actually a pretty good proxy. If you can halve the number of machines you have, or you can turn off stuff that you're not using, that's a really good way of cutting carbon. But as you get towards the end, you become quite sophisticated and you're doing really clever stuff with tuning and demand shifting and demand shaping. It's not quite such a good, a good measure anymore, but you know, just use your, we all went into tech because it's clever and it's interesting and it's complicated and it's... just use your brain.

Just everything that you save money on is not, is clearly not going to save you carbon and everywhere that saves carbon is not always going to save you money. But as a rule of thumb, if you're turning machines off, that's good.

Cost as a Lagging Indicator for Carbon Emissions

Asim Hussain: … I think more importantly, I think cost has two problems as a proxy for carbon emissions. Number one, and the same, this is the same problem you have with carbon emissions, it's the same issue. A, it's a lagging indicator. Like if you're developing a piece of software, you only know the cost of it after you've rolled it out and you've done it and you've moved on for a month onto the next project, and then somebody goes, "by the way, that's like slightly more expensive than we were expecting."


Like, "Oh, I suppose, but do you want me to stop working on this other project now?" And I'm like, "no, no, no, you carry on that project." It's a lagging indicator. It's like after everything's happened. And I suppose that also means it also has all the other problems that you have with using carbon as a proxy for driving action to reduce carbon emissions, like If you like the, the issue with looking at cost is like someone saying, "well, I'm spending like 3 million on this database and 4 million on this other thing." And you're like, "well, I don't know. I'm, I developed an application. What is my costs?" And so like you have this problem of really it's the problem is more how do you actually get information to the people at the coalface so that they can make decisions to actually reduce the emissions directly? And I think that's the challenge with cost is that you can't, it has all the same problems as carbon in trying to get information to people to actually, so they can know what to do. Because you can tell a department what their cost is, you can tell a department what their carbon is, but can you tell developer X on team Y the impact of a choice they're going to make? Is, I think that's really where we want to get to.

Ops Team tunes and manages cost

Opps, I realized I got two snip notes continuously. So, let’s continue to read the conversation where we left:

Anne Currie: I'm saying that generally for where everybody is at the moment, a lot of the good tuning comes at, comes from ops teams rather than development teams. And for ops teams, cost is not so much of a leading indicator. It's actually quite close to what they're doing day to day. So it's a really good metric if your ops team are the one who are doing the tuning to reduce carbon. Not perfect. As you say, it's a terrible, you're better off with performance being a metric if you're doing the development. Yeah.

Work shifting and shaping

So, Anne suggests to use work shifting instead of demand shifting because she thinks it creates a confusion about who is demanding and how demand shifts. She also pointed out it is still not that easy to assess carbon footprint. It is still very complicated quantitative measurement where you can’t say exact numbers confidently like saying respond time is 2 milliseconds.

Let’s read how she described demand shifting naming problem:

it's all demand shifting and shaping. And I do say it's a really terrible description because the demand hasn't changed. As far as we're concerned, the demand comes from users and the users still have demand and we're attempting to meet the demand that they have. We're not intending to shift that. But the name, I think the words demand shifting and demand shaping came from the grid.

New Tech Carbon Standard

The Tech Carbon Standard6, developed by Scott Logic, is a proposed standard aimed at classifying an organization's technology estate for consistent analysis and benchmarking of its technology carbon footprint. It draws inspiration from the GHG protocol7 and its emissions' classification in scopes one, two, and three, providing a structured approach for assessing carbon emissions in the tech industry.

IEA Electricity Consumption Report

Let’s reference Chris Adams:

Basically, they talk about what's happening over the next 10 years with electricity. And one of the headlines was they were saying that electricity consumption from data centers in terms of like AI and the cryptocurrency sector could double by 2026. So I'll just use the quote that I pulled from it, which was "electricity consumption from data centers, artificial intelligence, and the cryptocurrency sector could double by 2026.

Data centers are significant drivers of growth in electricity demand in many regions. After globally consuming an estimated 460 terawatt hours, in 2022, datacenters total electricity consumption could reach more than a thousand terawatt hours in 2026." So that's a doubling in essentially, what, two years?

This is particularly interesting because this is way higher than their previous figures that they used to have which were around 200. So Something's changed with these numbers for them to be that much higher. And I figured I'd open the floor to either of you about this because this has got a lot of pushback from the data center industry.

AI Datacenters

Anne got AI carbon footprint problem from different angle:

…Because AI is a really good example of a workload that works well with the fact that some places are much, have much more potential to generate green power than others. It's a latency insensitive workload that could be running in Greenland, not that Greenland has a massive data center industry at the moment, but it could do. It could be running further away.

But, consuming too much green energy still have embodied carbon problem.

PUE score corruption

because we're focused entirely on a metric, which is not a great metric, is forcing up water use. So, yeah, it takes us full back to the full circle of metrics are useful, but do not overly lean on them, or it can be worse than if you had never had them to start with.

I think it is all of my notes. I know it doesn’t make sense to read all of it, but I am doing this for myself.

But If you read up to that point, even with jumping, please ping me!

Let’s finish this episode by Swedish style goodbye: Hejdå. ( Pronounced like heydoo)