Building Green Software

Preface

It’s not easy being green.

Kermit the Frog

Climate change is real. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report of 2022 settled that. The world is now stepping up to respond, and it appears that companies will need to get on board with the energy transition or be left behind. Unfortunately, as a wise cultural icon once said, the changes required for a sustainable planet will not be easy.

The good news, however, is that most of the public cloud providers have already committed to net-zero cloud operations (commitments they need to be held to), and we can learn from and emulate them as well as other sustainability leaders in our sector. In fact, some of the tools we need are already open source or commercially available.

That’s fortunate, because the rest of us may soon be compelled by our customers, infrastructure providers, soaring bills, and incoming legislation to set and meet our own tough carbon targets. So how will software development and operations need to change to save the planet and our companies?

This book aims to help answer that question. Building Green Software is an overview of everything from how national grids are likely to evolve in response to renewable power, to how that will change operations, to how the day-to-day lives of developers will be affected by the energy transition. You may notice that many of the quotes included in this book are from folk who used to work for the hyperscalers. That doesn’t mean our quotees are renegade ...