Building Green Software

Chapter 5. Carbon Awareness

Carbon-aware computing is the quick win every green software practitioner should know about.

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We learned in Chapter 2 that not all electricity is the same. Some is deemed dirty because it is generated from higher-carbon resources, such as oil or coal, while some is considered clean because it is made from renewable or low-carbon sources, such as hydro or nuclear. The idea of doing more in our application when electricity is clean and less when electricity is dirty is what we call carbon-aware computing.

Carbon-aware computing is the new and very cool kid on the block. It’s an area of software engineering that is gaining an incredible amount of traction. According to the Green Software Foundation’s 2023 State of Green Software Report, “carbon-aware software is central to decarbonization”. Among the survey participants, although only 8% currently practice carbon-aware techniques in their development, another 46% were eager to start.

We should also give massive kudos to the public cloud providers for leading by example in communicating and publishing their major advancements in the space. For example, Microsoft announced that Windows Update became carbon-aware starting with Windows 11 in September 2022. Similarly, Google shared that it has been using carbon-aware approaches across the board since May 2021.

So in this chapter, we will present another way of achieving greenness within our software system: by applying carbon-aware techniques. ...