S12Y Barcelona

Learn, Collaborate and Share

A big thanks to Dynatrace for sponsoring venue & food.

Definition

S12Y = Sustainability

Definition

Digital resources

Digital Resource = Compute, Memory, Storage

Context: Digital Products

Digital Product = (Assembly x Resources) x Audience

What we can affect:

Assembly & Resources

Software has side effects.

Digital resources create environmental impact

And: Chips ain’t getting faster.

6.500 Watt - NVIDIA DGX A100

Choices of making software affect resource use

Lines of code per Windows version

With that comes an increase in digital resource demand

What about that Wordpress site?

Jevon’s Paradox

More efficient chips = more software

Circumventing technical problems by throwing more resources at it

leftpad

3 lines of code x 1 Billion dependent packages = impact

Remember: Scale matters.

What’s expected of me?

Step 1: Acknowledge it

Digital products create environmental impact.

Step 2: Take responsibility

For the impact from digital resources

Step 3: Spread awareness

You can use this presentation afterward

Step 4: Encourage Transparency

for the products you are working on

Today’s program

  1. New to this: Stay here.
  2. Experienced: Go with Mims.
  3. Break: 15:15. Done: 17:00.

Part 1: What’s sustainability?

The 3 Pillars

Balancing needs of environment, society & economy.

Sustainable Development

Sustainable development is a development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

Planetary Boundaries

The planetary boundaries concept presents a set of nine planetary boundaries within which humanity can continue to develop and thrive for generations to come. (Stockholm Resilience)

Part 2: What’s the problem?

Part 3: Myths & believes

It’s the user’s fault

It’s about energy

Source: CEDaCI

It’s powered by green energy

Source: Bloomberg NEF

The cloud is more efficient

Carbon, Carbon, Carbon

Reports by cloud providers

Part 4: To measure is to know

What are we measuring?

The supply chain of a digital product

Let’s measure!

IT Infrastructure used to look like this

Then we moved the application further and further away

And further

Let’s go back to this = digital resource

Capacity to compute, store & transport data

Can we attach environmental impact information those?

Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.10049v1

And we can make better guesses:

https://github.com/green-coding-berlin/spec-power-model

Hardware impact: Boavizta API

curl -X 'POST' \
  'https://api.boavizta.org/v1/server/?verbose=false&archetype=platform_compute_medium' \
  -H 'accept: application/json' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{
  "model": {
    "type": "rack"
  },
  "configuration": {
    "cpu": {
      "units": 2,
      "core_units": 12,
      "die_size_per_core": 245
    },
    "ram": [
      {
        "units": 12,
        "capacity": 64,
        "density": 1.79
      }
    ],
    "disk": [
      {
        "units": 4,
        "type": "ssd",
        "capacity": 400,
        "density": 50.6
      }
    ],
    "power_supply": {
      "units": 2,
      "unit_weight": 2.99
    }
  }
}'

If you have root: IPMI & RAPL

Putting it together

Generate the environmental impact report in CI/CD

Monitor environmental impact in operations

Use Dynatrace 🙂

Scaphandre: IPMI Energy Meter in Prometheus

Lot’s of people on working on Kubernetes plugins.

Part 5: What to do

What do you think we should do?

Create awareness

Transparency as a tool for change

Reduce SLA

Differentiate through sustainability, not features.

More?

  1. Communities: S12Y, Green Software Foundation, Green Web Foundation, Climate Action Tech, Boavizta, W3C Sustainability, Greening of Streaming
  2. Wiki: S12Y
  3. Standards: In the making
  4. Certification: ‘Blauer Engel’

And, how was it?

What you can do now:

1. Make a donation

ltmv.io/s12y

2. Help organize the next one

3. Talk to people in your organization

  • Create awareness
  • Make a plan
  • Measure

4. Have fun making sustainable digital products

5. Drive transparency

Thank you!

  1. Best practice guide: https://knowledge.sdialliance.org/softawere/principles-for-sustainable-software-design#b8b42a8756134415950c25a748355761
  2. Wiki: s12y.wiki
  3. Leave your email: https://ltmv.io/s12y-sub
  4. Have a tour with Isidre
  5. Let’s go have drinks & food