InfoQ Homepage Sustainable Computing Content on InfoQ
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Why Your Workloads Do Not Run on Renewable Energy (Yet) and What to Do about it
Renewable energy is an important step on the way to fight climate change. The energy produced by burning fossil resources is one of the main drivers of carbon emissions. But running a datacenter on renewable energy all the time is difficult. Usually - with only a few exceptions - your workloads do not run on renewable energy.
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Sustainable Software Systems Using Circular Economy Principles
The circular economy is a framework that aims to keep products and materials in use for as long as possible, reducing waste and pollution, and regenerating natural systems. As practitioners or change enablers, we can support sustainable product development using concepts from the circular economy in our daily work.
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What Carbon Neutral Really Means and How Net-Zero Is Different
Carbon neutrality means that the total amount of emissions is either eliminated, neutralized, or compensated. Net-zero is a target that doesn’t include compensation and puts more emphasis on avoiding carbon emissions. Many products, data centers, or companies are already carbon neutral, but few have reached net-zero. The problem with offsetting approaches is that you continue to emit carbon.
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Is ChatGPT Fit for Every Purpose: Alan Turing Ethics Fellow Presents Checklist in Devoxx UK Keynote
During her keynote at Devoxx UK, Mhairi Aitken talked about the limitations of AI when grappling with the complexities of human language. Further, she provided checklist developers use to inspect the AI Foundations before building on top of them. She urged us to be guided by ethical and social considerations when building on AI, as a general-purpose AI model may not be fit for every purpose.
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Why Cloud Zombies Are Destroying the Planet and How You Can Stop Them
At QCon London, Holly Cummins, Quarkus senior principal software engineer at RedHat, talked about how utilization and elasticity relate to sustainability. In addition, she introduced a range of practical zombie-hunting techniques, including absurdly simple automation, LightSwitchOps, and FinOps.
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Cloud Provider Sustainability: the Need for a Workload Carbon Footprint Standard
Adrian Cockcroft, tech advisor and former VP for sustainability architecture at Amazon, shared his vision at QCon London on sustainability commitments for cloud providers and the current challenges in determining their supply chain carbon footprint. Cockcroft advocated for a new real-time carbon footprint standard.
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Green Software Development - What Can You Do Now, and Where is the Industry Heading?
Making code more efficient often ends up saving carbon. Storing less information and compressing it can also lower your carbon footprint. There are open-source projects and standards and guides available that can be used to increase sustainability in software development. Measurement standardization is needed to compare the environmental impact of cloud suppliers.
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Sustainability for Development and Operations with DevSusOps
For a sustainability transformation, a business has to figure out how to measure its carbon footprint, come up with a plan to change the way it powers everything, and change the products they’re making, and even the markets that they operate in. Adrian Cockcroft spoke about sustainability in development and operations at QCon San Francisco 2022.
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Sustainability for Software Companies: Reducing Impact by Deciding What Not to Do
Small and medium-sized companies can contribute to sustainability with emissions reduction, mental health offerings and inclusion. To support sustainability, software engineers can think about “what not to do” to reduce complexity and make solutions smaller, resulting in a smaller carbon footprint.
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Azure Adds Sustainability Guidance to Well-Architected Framework
During the recent Ignite conference, Microsoft announced new technical guidance within the Azure Well-Architected Framework (WAF) to help customers and partners achieve their sustainability goals.
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Google Cloud Launches New Sustainability Offerings for Climate Resiliency
At the recent Sustainability Summit, Google launched several new sustainability offerings to help public sector agencies and researchers to improve climate resilience. These offerings are Climate Insights for natural resources and Climate Insights for infrastructure.
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Green Software Development: Terminology and Climate Commitments Explained by Microsoft at Devoxx UK
As a side effect of the accelerated move towards the cloud, the software industry is contributing more and more to global warming. Companies have taken on different commitments: Net-Zero, Carbon Neutral, etc. Asim Hussain, Green Cloud Advocacy Lead @ Microsoft deciphers them during the Devoxx UK keynote. Understanding them will help developers move the needle for each type of commitment.
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How Software Affects Climate Change, and What Software Engineers Can Do about It
There are huge amounts of software running everywhere on the planet - and this software consumes energy when it is running. Unfortunately most of the energy world-wide is still being produced by burning fossil fuels. Software engineers can improve the software so that it uses less energy to do its job, then less energy needs to be produced by burning fossil fuels, which is better for the climate.
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Need Help Tracking Cloud Emissions? Microsoft Previews Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability
At the recent Inspire 2021 conference, Microsoft announced the preview of Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability, a new service to help companies measure and manage their carbon emissions, set sustainability goals and take measurable action.
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Google Cloud Introduces Option to Choose Region with Lowest CO2 Footprint
Google has recently introduced the option to choose a Google Cloud region according to the lowest CO2 footprint. The new feature is currently available for Cloud Run and Datastream only, with Google planning to extend the offer to more Google Cloud services in the future.