I think one of the hardest things about green software can be knowing where to start. The scope is wide, there are multiple possible solutions, and it’s a new and evolving area. Some approaches I’ve written about, like carbon aware demand shifting can seem complex and not all tasks can be scaled in this way. Measurement of your carbon emissions is a great place to start. You could use a dashboard from your cloud provider or an open source tool like Cloud Carbon Footprint....
In this post, we’ll look at carbon-aware scheduling using Kubernetes. This post focuses on spatial shifting using Karmada. It follows on from my last post where I looked at temporal shifting using KEDA and the carbon-aware-keda-operator from Microsoft. Temporal shifting involves running non-time-sensitive workloads at times when the carbon intensity of the electricity grid being used is lower. Spatial shifting involves moving workloads to physical locations where the grid carbon intensity is lower....
The Carbon Aware KEDA Operator was announced by Microsoft in April this year in a keynote at KubeCon EU in Amsterdam. Sadly I couldn’t attend KubeCon this time but it was good to see from afar that there were more sustainability talks and the great work the Environmental Sustainability TAG (Technical Advisory Group) is doing coordinating efforts across the CNCF and liaising with other organizations like the Green Software Foundation....
Green Software Engineering is a new and evolving branch of software engineering for building more sustainable systems. Using these types of techniques the tech sector can play its part in tackling the climate crisis and reducing our dependence on fossil fuels. For running software electricity consumption is a key metric. Of course the source of that electricity and the carbon emissions embodied in the hardware are also important. However even if the electricity sourced consists of mainly renewable energy, consuming less electricity frees it up to be used for other purposes....
