Sustainability
Showing 6 out of 6 results
GOTO Berlin Will Plant a Tree for Every Attendee
With each conference GOTO organizes, we make the commitment to produce an event with integrity, respect for the environment and a commitment to positive social impact. We’re well aware of the unnecessary waste that...
Rethinking Conference Swag
Conferences can be big productions, and that means some unnecessary waste. We’re always working on minimizing our impact (like making sure our signage is reusable for future events), but this year, we’re taking it...
Making Software and Data Architectures More Sustainable
The rising threat of climate change is leading countries to commit to ambitious carbon-reduction targets. For example, more than 70 have made commitments to achieve net-zero emissions. The private sector has also made reducing carbon emissions a top priority; almost half of Fortune 500 companies have commitments to reduce emissions by 2030. Technology represents a huge opportunity, but it has been largely overlooked to date. As digital continues to proliferate in all aspects of the human experience, software's energy consumption will grow significantly. Consider that every interaction between applications and devices requires energy to complete. Multiply that by billions of transactions and the footprint of software and data quickly adds up. To date, sustainability in software and data architectures hasn't been a priority for companies, due in part to several misconceptions. Many IT leaders believe that software's energy footprint is somewhat negligible or already optimized, the development of energy-efficient software incurs more infrastructure costs, and the implementation of energy-efficient software increases costs through higher complexity and lower performance. Making progress on sustainability requires action at multiple levels. Software developers can reduce the carbon emissions from software and data by being aware of the effects of their choices. CTOs can make environmental sustainability a nonfunctional requirement for software development. And companies can incorporate the environmental effects of software as a metric when gauging the quality of a solution. The goal is to cultivate a culture that embeds environmental sustainability into standard software and data engineering practices. Now is the perfect time to start. Of course, improving sustainability in data and software alone won't solve climate change. But with an understanding of technology's contribution to carbon emissions, a focus on tech's foundational elements can pave the way for more substantial reductions in the future.
Energy-Efficient Software Architecture for Developers
Software architecture practices are methods and techniques that allow software designers and developers to make designs that hopefully strike the right balance between competing quality attributes: modifiability, performance, availability, security, etc. However, in the midst of a threatening climate crisis and with an energy crisis on top of that, an important quality, namely energy efficiency, must be considered as well: for all the merits of a cool microservice architecture, will it also save precious energy compared to the classic monolith? In this talk, I will discuss energy efficiency in our architectural design with an emphasis on the practical challenges facing architects and developers: what are the tactics and rules of thumbs to use, how do we measure power consumption and experiment with various designs, and how do we discuss and collaborate around it? As a university teacher, my primary focus is on teaching software architecture methods and techniques and my perspective is on how to best educate people in this area, by finding motivating examples and exercises, as well as trying to capture and convey the techniques that provides most value for the least effort.
These Five Tricks Can Make Your Apps Greener, Cheaper & Nicer
The code we write has a climate impact. But how big is that impact? How do we measure it? How do we reduce it? Is the cloud helping? What’s going on with Virginia? Are we still allowed to do CI/CD? Will native compilation save us? Is Java even a good choice anymore? This talk discusses some of the trade-offs for a modern software developer, and provides a roadmap to figuring out the right thing. Disclosure: Holly works on Quarkus. Along the way, she will talk about Quarkus sustainability measurements we’ve been doing … but it’s ok, because she promises that the Quarkus carbon data is exciting and interesting.