Businesses are rapidly having to contend with responding to the climate crisis, and the tech industry is set to become one of the biggest contributors to energy drain by the end of the decade. It is clear that sustainable software options are a goal, but many firms are reluctant to adopt lower-carbon systems out of concern for loss of power.
Joining us this week is Behrad Babaee, Technology Evangelist at Aerospike, to talk about his proposals for a universal metric with which to measure the carbon output of software, and how it is possible to cut cost, latency and carbon emissions at the same time.
Highlights
“You know that, you know, energy is one of the most polluting businesses in the world. So therefore, IT industry is one of the polluting industries of the world. So I was like, Okay, if you're like that, is there any way to measure the amount of emissions that we are producing? Right, you know, to be able to review something, you first need to be able to measure it. And I looked around, and I couldn't find anything that gives you any indication about how much emissions a software produces.”
“20% of the energy in seven years, is possibly more than 50% of the energy that we're using today. So using all of the levers that we have to reduce the emissions is just the right thing to do.”
“So significant changes in the hardware in the past 16 years caused a lot of changes in the way that we write programmes. But we still have a lot of programmes that were written for that kind of hardware that was good for 2006. And you can still run them on the modern hardware that we have today. But they do a lot of clever things to combat the scarcity of resources that they were facing in 2006, which you don't need to do today.”
Read the full transcript here.
Footnotes
- CO2 Emission Efficiency as a Measurable Non-Functional Requirement: An Emission Estimation Framework
- Google Cloud’s sustainability expansion offers new solutions for businesses with green ambitions
- Is sustainability the next big channel play?
- Google Earth Engine open for business on Google Cloud, in corporate sustainability push
- Microsoft partners commit to 2050 net zero target
- Tech Nation and PwC partner to scale 20 of the UK's most exciting climate tech companies
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