Sustainability in software engineering - how to fight climate change
summary
Claims that data center waste is huge with 25–30% zombies and another ~33% of workloads active less than 5%, and VMware’s consolidation finding ~66% unused capacity; shows a single typical server rack can emit as much CO2 as a transatlantic passenger flight. Recommends concrete actions: GraalVM / Spring Native to cut memory and startup time so services can scale-to-zero, right-sizing instances and memory, and using energy-mix APIs plus smarter Kubernetes schedulers to place workloads where renewable supply is highest. Carbon offsets are a last resort, not a substitute for decarbonization.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (25)
- 0:00Introduction
- 2:45Is climate change real
- 3:00What can we do
- 4:22What causes climate change
- 5:08Carbon emissions
- 5:48Data centers
- 8:29Getting to 100 renewable energy
- 10:31Reducing energy consumption
- 12:32The big impact
- 14:10The energy consumption
- 14:47The rule of thumb
- 16:57Visualization
- 17:19Hardware production
- 18:13Data behind the scenes
- 19:51Its a big problem
- 23:53What do you do
- 24:05Memory consumption
- 29:03Native Image
- 30:54Software size
- 31:19Where to run software
- 34:42Kubernetes scheduler
- 35:43Carbon offsetting
- 37:07Choosing the right offsetting projects
- 40:25Conclusion
- 41:49Questions
related talks
32mFighting Climate Change by Building Sustainable Software
41mWriting Greener Software Even When You Are Stuck On-Prem
46mMaking Software & Data Architectures Sustainable
55mCode that Won't Heat the Planet: Engineering Sustainable Software for a Better Future
57mSustainable Green Software development
39mCreate an Eco-Friendly World with Green Software Engineering
31mCreate an eco-friendly world with Green Software Engineering
31mThe state of Green Washing