Does running on green provider make our software green?

Does running on green provider make our software green?

0:00

/357.542875

1×

Listen to me read this post here (not an AI-generated voice!) or subscribe to the feed in your podcast app.

In my previous article, I raised a question about the need for making software more efficient if we're running on the green provider. Due to popularity of my writing, I didn't get any insights from the readers, but that will not stop me to write the answer myself. Or at least stop me from trying to answer this myself.

Why do we want to make our software efficient even when we're running on green provider?

From the first glance - we don't need to do it, right? Running on the green provider makes our software green. Sure, why not! Well, as with the most things in life, the answer is not that simple. In this article, we'll explore why.

What is a green (cloud) provider?

It is something every (cloud) provider strives to be. It is a company that offers (cloud) computing services while prioritising sustainability and renewable energy usage.

Some of the key aspects providers can have to consider themselves a green provider are:

• the power supply to the data centres comes primarily through renewable energy sources,
• they are using advanced cooling systems, optimising server utilisation, and use energy-efficient hardware to minimise power consumption,
• actively track and work on reducing their carbon emissions,
• being transparent with the power usage and carbon emission data,
• opting for the increase of the device life cycle, re-using and re-furbishing hardware.

I've already written some time ago about various levels of greenness of the most popular cloud providers trifecta.

Here:

What are the greenest regions in the AWS?

How do you consider a Cloud region green region? What is a carbon footprint and how to measure it on AWS? What are the greenest regions to run your workloads on AWS? These, and a couple of more questions we answer in this article.

Wondering ChimpMarjan Bugarinović

Here:

What are the greenest regions in Azure?

What are emission scopes and what do they mean? What methods are used to calculate those emissions? Which methods Microsoft uses to calculate them? What regions are the greenest one on Azure? These and more questions we answer in this article!

Wondering ChimpMarjan Bugarinović

And here:

What are the greenest regions in GCP?

What is PUE, and how is it calculated? Why is important? What are the greenest regions in the GCP and where you can find that information? This, and many more, you can find out in this article.

Wondering ChimpMarjan Bugarinović

So, I won't go into details about whether they are (or not) green providers. Do they consider themselves to be - maybe (probably, yes)?

There are a couple of smaller providers that have done much more sustainability-wise, than the big players above. I've mentioned one of them in previous articles - Scaleway. It was fascinating to me how they show the real time data centre PUE dashboards on their website.

Data centres and an increase in energy consumption

Have you ever wondered how the AI impacted the energy and water consumptions of data centres? In this article, we delve into that question.

Wondering ChimpMarjan Bugarinović

A couple of other providers to consider are OVH cloud, Switch, Green Mountain data centres.

So, does running on green providers also make our software green?

In short - not really. Because digital sustainability has two dimensions:

1. operational and
2. manufacturing dimension.

Operational dimension

When looking into the data centre efficiency metrics, for example Power Usage Effectiveness, we focus only on the operational dimension. That is - what type of energy is spent for running the hardware, and with it, your software. The operational aspect.

Quick reminder, PUE is a standard efficiency metric for power consumption in data centres. It is a ratio of total facility energy to IT equipment energy used in the data centre.

Don't get me wrong, having PUE and having the tendency to bring PUE down is good. However, having only PUE is not enough, because it shows only one dimension.

Manufacturing dimension

What we are missing is the manufacturing dimension - how much energy was spent in manufacturing hardware and data centre buildings? This is really hard to answer, but a rather important thing to have in mind.

The main reason why your software doesn't become automatically green when we switch it to a green cloud provider is the manufacturing cost of hardware. If we optimise our software solution and make sure it runs on the existing hardware, moving to a green provider can make it green to one extent. But, if we don't optimise and with each new release, or new product increment, we require different, more powerful hardware - running on green providers cannot make our software green.

Conclusion

In order to have and run green software, we need to have a look at both aspects of digital sustainability - operational and manufacturing. Focusing only on operational can bring us up to a certain point. To have a real impact is to take manufacturing aspect as well, and incorporate it in our requirements process.

Good news is that we can have a significant improvement in both of them by working on making our software (code) more efficient. And how to do that? There are several ways:

• Delete stuff that is not used.
• Be mindful of the data you save.
• Make sure you don't add any unnecessary (or future) functionality.
• Switch to more efficient services and libraries.
• Ensure backward compatibility.
• Identify and address bottlenecks with performance profiling.
• Use devices to the fullest and make them last as long as possible.

That's all for today! Thanks for reading until the end. Use the comment section below to add your thoughts, feedback...

See you in the next article!