Environment Variables

👉 State of Green Software Survey - click this link to access! 👈The future of Green Software lies in education. In this episode host Chris Adams is joined by Luis Cruz of TU Delft and Sara Bergman of Microsoft as they discuss how to teach and learn to make Green Software. With Luis’ unique insight as a professor, he is able to bring us up to date with pedagogical approaches that are laying the groundwork for future software engineers.Learn more about our guests:Chris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / WebsiteSara Bergman: LinkedIn / TwitterLuis Cruz: LinkedIn / Twitter / Website (with course info).Episode resources:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter Luis’ open source course on sustainable software engineering, taught at TU DelftSara’s Paper on performance characteristics of Blockchains and other distributed consensus mechanismsPeople to follow doing relevant work in this field:Person: Simin Nadjm-Tehrani - IEEE Xplore Author ProfilePerson: Hannah Smith: Educator - Hannah Smith (opcan.co.uk)Person: Sabine Canditt and her book Small steps. Large... by Sabine CandittPerson: Patricia Lago: Full Professor at VUAmsterdam.Person: Elina Eriksson: Associate Professor KTH. Person: Mikael Asplund: Linköping University.Person: Sandra Pallier - ClimateAction.tech organiser and designer at Microsoft.Person: Colleen Josephson - VM Ware. Collen’s recent talk and paper at ACM Energy.Person: Bilge Acun - Facebook/Meta - See Carbon Explorer on github.If you enjoyed this episode then please either:Follow, rate, and review on Apple PodcastsFollow and rate on SpotifyWatch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!Transcript Below:Luis Cruz: If you want to change the generation of software engineers, you need to change the mindset of their leaders and you need to start earlier. And the obvious answer for that is to include green software as part of our university courses.Chris Adams: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discussed the latest news and events surrounding green software. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software. I'm your host, Chris Adams. Welcome to Environment Variables. My name's Chris Adams. And on this episode, I am joined by Sara Bergman of Microsoft and Luis Cruz of TU Delft. That's technical university of Delft. We'll be talking about how people teach and learn to make green software. Before we dive in though, maybe it's time for a quick round of introductions.My name is Chris Adams. I am the chair of the Green Software Foundation policy group, and I'm also the executive director of the Green Web Foundation, where we work towards an entirely fossil for internet by 2030, Luis. Would you be so kind as to introduce yourself, then we'll give Sara a chance to explain, introduce herself and see what she, and what she does.Luis Cruz: Sure thing. Hello everyone. My name is Luis Cruz, and I'm an assistant professor at the software engineering group at TU Delft. And there we do research and educate the next generation of software developers. and our main topics, we've overrun, software testing, software deducting, and of course also about green software, how to build energy efficient software.So most of my time is devoted on doing research on green software, green AI, sustainable software engineering, and of course also about educating and finally about managing because when we have a lot of people, we also have to manage. People and students are also part of these managing and management load that we have at the universities, like to you, Chris.Chris Adams: Luis. And, uh, Sara, one of our recurring hosts. Why don't you introduce yourself for some of the folks who may not have heard the previous episodes?Sara Bergman: Great. Thanks. Always great to be back on the podcast. My name is Sara Bergman. I am a software engineer at Microsoft where I work in M 365 or with M 365 products. And in the Green Software Foundation, I'm the chair of the writer's project, where we deal with some of our written materials, like the articles we produce and the newsletter that you're all hopefully subscribed to.Chris Adams: Okay, thank you, Sara. And just for the record, while you brought that up, if someone did want to subscribe to the newsletter and find out about this through regular and. Updates, where would they be going to find out such a thing?Sara Bergman: you go to our website, Green Software Foundation and it should be like right in your face.Chris Adams: Okay. Awesome. I think even I could follow that, actually. Okay. So today we're talking about basically teaching, teaching green software, because if we're gonna be. Helping people figure out how to make more planet friendly applications. Then it probably helps to know what's going on in the world of teaching software and see where, where people are learning this stuff.And this is partly why Luis is kind of, I'm glad to have you on for this because we actually met through things like the climate action.tech slack group. But one thing that was, I found really exciting from some of the work you did was the fact that you were working on. Entirely open syllabus for sustainable software engineering and obviously lots of us like open source, an open, an open culture, but I figured it might be worth just maybe you telling us a little bit about why the core, why you made the course and why you chose to make it open.Luis Cruz: Yeah, that's a very good question, Chris. And that's a, maybe let me get back a little bit and tell you. How did all this started? Yeah, so it started by the fact that I was doing research in green software way before teaching sustainable software engineering and the always the main motivation point was the fact that.Software engineers are eager to build more energy efficient software, but they often lack the resources or they often don't know exactly how to do it, but they, they are highly motivated to do it. So they keep asking about what are the best practices, how can we test energy efficiency, these sort of things.So, so that was my main motivation to start this line of research, but then of course, I started realizing, okay. I should not only be doing research in my. Office, right. I should also try to communicate these back to developers. And that was when I realized that, in fact, it's not only about building or creating writing papers, but also about communicate them back to the community when, and when you Google about it, or when you look at the Web for resources about this, you almost don't see anything about it.And then if you look at the conversations that we have. Climate action. How to change our software industry into a more sustainable industry. It always revolve around new policies, right? How to make sure that the industry is complying. with sustainable practices, how to make sure that we can ask our suppliers for energy efficient certificates, these sort of things.But sometimes we forget that if you want to change our society. The strongest weapon we have is education. Right? If you want to change the generation of software engineers of the software industry, you need to change the mindset of their leaders and you need to start earlier and. To me, the obvious answer for that is to include green software as part of our university courses, because that's how you change the mindset of the future leaders in the next generation of software engineering.But again, when I started, when I realized this, I started looking for content at, in my university, okay. Who is teaching these kind of topics. And I realized. , there was a lot of content around sustainability at UD Delft, but they kind of miss the, the fact that software also has an impact on sustainability.So if you build a software system, this software system will probably have a carbon impact. And somehow I feel that the other fields kind of miss this point because they tend to. Target sustainable problems by creating a new AI model, creating a new software system that will automate something and help them improve the sustainability of their problems.And they kind of forget that if you run something in a server, that server will probably be spending energy. So going back to the, to these pursuit of sustainability topics at the university, I realized that the computer science courses had nothing to do about. . And the funny thing is that if you think about green software, you will see that it, it, it covers, or it touches upon different topics of computer science testing, but programming languages, even in software engineering, the way you, the software development life cycle.If you look at all the stages, every single stage. Should have a perspective on sustainability if you really want to make sustainable software. So in a way, the fact that none of these courses in computer science had a single chapter that would cover energy efficiency or sustainability was somehow a trigger for me and more motivation for me to think, okay, we really need to start creating.Content. And at the Delft, they were very open. When I started pitching about a new course idea, they thought, okay, this is really something that aligns with our values. So they gave me all the freedom to start designing the course and creating the course. and I'm really happy that this first edition we had around 20, 20 something students that were really enthusiastic about the topic and they knew nothing about it.Because as I said, there was nothing around this and there were already. Fourth year master students. So after four years of education, they, they were not exposed to this to me, the fact that it was so challenging to find content, to help me design the course. I think it was clear to me that I would, if I wanted to change our community, I would have to deliver this content and everyone can use it and reuse it and learn from it because that's the way that we can make.A second addition of this course, or someone else can make an improved addition of a sustainable software engineering course. And that's the main goal. So this, this is not about getting a recognition. This is about changing society. And, and I think the best thing we can do to change society is to make this content open.Chris Adams: Cool. So I have a couple of questions, but before I come in on that, I just want to see Sarah. Is there anything that you want to kind of come in on there before I come in with my questions on this?Sara Bergman: This is where I wish the podcast was like a video recording. Cause you would've seen me nodding vigorously throughout entire thing. Yeah. There's so much of this that resonates very deeply with me. And, and I was lucky enough to be one like not, not one of your students, but when I was a student a few years ago in, in Sweden, we did have a course called green.It led by an amazing professor called Simin who basically. she like her, the whole course was based on reading research papers. So it's like she has been a researcher in this field for a long time about energy efficiency. And she was basically like, don't just take my word for it. Take all of these other researchers word for it.And it really opened my eyes a lot. And I know it changed other people's mindset to took the course. And that was the one course that made me wanna pursue this more. It's such a powerful tool and yeah, just a big plus one, I guess.Chris Adams: Cool. Right. Well, Louis, when students are actually taking this course, were there some parts of introducing a sustainability element that seem to work particularly easily? Or were there some parts that they particularly struggled with? Because what I've learned is that some things can be a little bit counterintuitive and yeah, I'm really curious, cuz I've never heard from someone who's actually teaching, you know, undergrads home or even postgraduates for them to kind of pick up some of these skills that are obviously gonna be in demand in the future.Luis Cruz: Yeah, that is a very, very good question. So one important part of the course is about measuring energy. Option of a software application. Yeah. And I don't want to be boring or anything, but of course, when you have to measure, you need a metric, right. You need to measure a particular metric and this metric needs to be, uh, Clear enough for the person that is analyzing the data.Yeah. So to make it more precise, when you are measuring energy efficiency, probably you're gonna look into energy consumption, but you also have more metrics. You also have the power consumption, right? And, and power can be the average power over the execution of a particular software, but can also be the instant power that is being.Uh, used by the, by the CPUs, by the memory, by the whole laptop system. So this is the most issue. So what should I be analyzing energy or power. And depending on the use case, you should be looking at one or another, but then of course you need to make sense out of it. So if your software is wasting 20 jewels after two minutes, I mean, what does it mean?Is it energy efficient or is it like energy inefficient? Should I do something about it? Should I just assume that it's fine. And this kind of thing requires quite some discussion most of the time, because every single problem is different. Every, every software, every program language will have different thresholds and I won't have a clear answer.Like I, I always don't have all the answers for every single. Result we get, but one of the cool things about having this course is that then we use that as an opportunity for discussion during the class. And this works quite well. When you have around 20, 30 people in the same room. Because if it's more than that, it's a bit difficult.Sometimes it happens to have really large classes, but when you have a small group, they will come up with the most interesting observations about this. So that's really exciting when you bring people together just to critically analyze these, these, these bullet. And another thing that I'd like to bring up here is that, so my main passion goes around energy efficiency.So the most of the course is about energy efficiency and software, but we also focus on other aspects of sustainability. Individual sustainability as in how to make sure that your software organization is actually helping developers or all the stakeholders be more productive and satisfied with the work environment.So we call it individual sustainability. and the social sustainability, how your software is affecting democracy or how is it affecting the wellbeing of individuals in the soci in the society? And these kind of things are also. Also bring very interesting questions that not always have clear or not, not always everyone is on the same page.For example, I can bring up the concept of inclusive programming language, but sometimes it's very difficult for some students to understand some, some of the guidelines that we have to make sure that this particular software is inclusive.Chris Adams: so there's one thing that you spoke about was this, as I understand it, there's an issue about units. Like, what am I using? Cause you mentioned was like power and energy, for example. So that was one thing that you mentioned that was something that students struggle with. And then this thing about like inclusive programming is that like how easy it might be to learn in terms of how many concepts you need to have in your head.Something like Python or by comparison to like say C plus plus, which has a lot more features than a language, for example, is it that kind of.Luis Cruz: Now, when we, when we talk about inclusiveness, it's more about some keywords that you might have in your code that might have a meaning in our society. That. That might be not so inclusive. Yeah. For example, there are some guidelines around inclusive language that recommend you not use dummy Variables.For example, like, uh, dummy variable is something that every code learns, uh, to use, uh, since the first stages, because sometimes you need to have a done variable.Chris Adams: this is like food bar, Baz, that kind of stuff. When you say dummy. Okay.Luis Cruz: And, and, and, and these dummy, some guidelines say, Hmm, you might be, you might want to use a different. Word here that, that doesn't denote that someone is silly or this kind of things, or that someone doesn't is not mentally well.So maybe you want to use just like, I, I don't remember the replacement, but there is a dictionary with a few, uh, new replacements for all these Variables. And usually this is, this is so new for everyone that if you look at the code, no one is following these practices, but every single. Part of this let's call a dictionary has a meaning behind it that it's not immediate for us because we are kind of privileged and that we, we don't need to worry about this.Or we, we never suffer from, from the users of these names in society, but they will actually affect someone. And, and that's why many organizations are starting to bring this up.Sara Bergman: I think this is really interesting, cuz I've I remember being to the NDC conference, the conference here in Oslo, it was remote cuz it was 2020 I believe. And it was a keynote about the same concept and I had. thought about a lot of this concept otherwise, but things. Why is it called a whitelist and a blacklist?When we really mean an allow list and a block list, those words are actually more descriptive, but it's true tradition. We've used other words, for example, if you mean a primary and a secondary data source, why would you use terminology like monster slave, cuz really what you mean is primary and secondary.They, they better explain the scenario and they're also more inclusive, but I think that's a learning curve for, for a lot of people. No matter your, your age or experience level in the.Chris Adams: Yeah, I agree. This is something that you you'll see in loads of code bases, kind of quote unquote in the wild as well. And like a, you do see some organiza, some large projects actually starting to adopt this kind of stuff, but on the subject of. Particular kind of like terminology, you said one or two really interesting things there.Luis, you spoke about the idea of, okay. There's efficiency, but there's also like the individual sustainability and also the impact that you might have on the outside world. And I suppose internally we have. I mean when recently I, I was on a panel recently, and one discussion was basically about this distinction between say green it and green software.And it for sustainability, like this idea that these are two separate concepts, which may be related, but they're different from each other. And a lot of the time it's very easy to see these ideas being conflated a lot. And, uh, I wonder if this is something that you've seen you've seen on the course, or if you've, or this is something students have been able to kind of pick up quite intuitively, for example,Luis Cruz: Well, to be honest, I do know the answer. Case on the first class, I made sure that we all have a common definition, but I could imagine that some of my students were expecting something else when they joined the course. Yeah. Because indeed there are so many different names around sustainability about around the green software.And when I mention green AI, people immediately think about AI for energy efficiency or AI for social good. And. when I talk about green AI, and I'm not saying that I have the right definition. because there are so many definitions that it's difficult to keep up with the right ones. But when I talk about green AI immediately think about building AI systems that are energy efficient, and they have minimal footprint foot painting our.So, but I'm not claiming that I have the right definition because this is so new. I mean, the first paper on green AI is like three or four years old. And I don't think we are already at the stage where we can say that our, our field is mature, that we can already. Settle on these definitions because maybe next year a new problem will bring will, will be brought into the picture and we need another definition.And then suddenly we need to rethink about this. And indeed, as you were saying, this, this can be quite, not only encounter intuitive, but confusing. And, and the simple fact that when we talk about sustainable software engineering, Uh, different people might have different definitions. And I'm gonna challenge that definition a little bit.So some definitions, when we talk about sustainable software engineering also include economical, sustainability. and technical sustainability. And of course we, we don't care about economical, sustainability. Everyone is taking care of that. Saudi the world runs and we don't care about technical sustainability because software is a Newfield is already.Quite mature for 60 years, we have been studying technical sustainability for software, but just to give you an idea that this doesn't make our life easier, but the good thing is that once we start getting our hands dirty, once we start measuring energy consumption and. Extracting knowledge out of these data and experiments, definitions are just a way of communicating it.But what we need is groundwork people like-minded that are willing to create new tools, do new experiments, things like. What is the most energy efficient video call platform? Is it zoom? Is it Microsoft teams? No one use, no, no one knows, but if I knew I'll start doing all my calls with a particular system, because I'll know that I'll know there is an impact.They are actually worrying about it and they are actually trying to, to, to do something about it. So they, they deserve having more users.Sara Bergman: Yeah, and I think that's an interesting point as well. If you think about students and, and I can only speak from my own experience as I'm gonna self proclaim as a young person, as a millennial or a zillennial, it's a new word I've learned, which is the people between millennial and gen Z. I don't know.Maybe that's where I fall in. Anyway, I think my generation grew up more with climate awareness. There was never a grace period in our life where we were not aware of climate change or where we did not feel the. Oh, climate change. I cannot remember a time in my life where I was told because I've always known sort of cuz I was, I, I, I suppose I was told at some point that I was too young to remember that now.So there is an increased desire, I think, to, to lean in and to be part of the solution. I think an easier way for people is, is to use you say you become a software engineer, cuz that's your passion or, or a like researcher in the field, but you still wanna do something to help. And. Applying technology to a climate problem seems like the easiest thing you can do.Like, yes, I love AI. I wanna use it for good. And that's great. Like we're not saying stop doing that, but I think when you flip it on the end and say, okay, but if the way you're doing this is actually unsustainable, it's kind of maybe not. counterintuitive, but not really meeting what you're trying to do.And I've been speaking a lot externally, specifically about machine learning and AI. And almost every time I get people after almost frustrated, like, but I wanna know what I can do. And it's like, yeah, but I totally, you, a bunch of things you can do. No, but I don't wanna, I just wanna do my normal stuff, like code away and then like contribute to something.And I think as a mindset, mind shift that need to happen and you can definitely do both, but I think we also need a bit of marketing for like this, what you said Luis, about building these libraries, doing these case studies, doing the groundwork to figure out, cause it's still very new, but that doesn't mean there are no opportunities and no chances for people to contribute there on the opposite.There are tons of chances for people to contribute and, and make it a big, significant contribution and difference to, to this.Chris Adams: So, this is actually maybe a good time to plug for people. Who've never heard this who haven't, haven't listened to previous episodes. Some of the work we did when we looked at AI green, eye green, AI and AI for sustainability. Of issues ago in that we had both, um, Dr. Lynn Kaack, sorry professor Lynn Kaack talking about basic AI for sustainability and some of the specific applications you could actually see in, and also where some of the blind spots might be when it comes to regulators.But the nice thing was that there was a paper that, that, that she'd mentioned, but also one of the other people on the other guests will, I totally forgot Will's name, but his paper was actually published specifically, like iterating through all these techniques you can actually use. So, if you look through the previous episodes and the show notes, you'll see the paper, which literally says these are some of the techniques you're using.So if you're using technique a here's how to, here's how to use technique B for almost the same impact, or these are the trade offs you might actually have. And I, Sara, I, I kind of wanna ask you a little bit about some of the study, some of the work that you studied on this. Cuz as I understand it, you were doing a bit of work.Consensus mechanisms. I don't wanna, let's not dive too deeply into the world of, of cryptocurrencies and, and greening cryptocurrencies, cuz to an extent it feels like the price of the falling price is sorting some of the out for anyway. But there is a whole thing. Like you, you did some work comparing, I think some tools around this, like a like Hyperledger.Sara Bergman: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So back this was my master thesis actually, which was later turned into a paper. At the time blockchain technology, I'm not, I'm gonna refer to it as blockchain technologies sort of remove the economics from it because you can view it as an economic structure, or you can view it as a data structure for this talk.We're gonna look at it as a data structure, cuz that allows us more freedom in some sense. So at the time blockchain technology was really new. There were very, very few studies and to the best of our knowledge, the study I did was the first study where we actually compared. Blockchain technology to distribute the databases cause especially for permission, blockchains, so where you, where you have traffic, they can achieve a lot of the same use cases.And it can be interesting for you as a practitioner to know when you should select one or the other. Because in theory, in my mind, a blockchain is kind of like an append only data structure. and that sounded interesting to, to investigate more, cuz it's very different from a traditional distributed database, even though they can do some things very similarly.So I looked specifically at Hyperledger fabric, which was still kind of new at the time and at Cassandra who, who was a bit older at the time and did a performance comparison, cuz performances is one aspect you can like sustainability is very multifaceted. and when you have a master thesis, you kind of have limited times you can't delve into all the things.Uh, but yeah, that was, that was the work that I did.Chris Adams: So Cassandra, a distributed kind of key value store essentially, and a Hyperledger, which I, I, I can't even begin to understand how, uh, or, or talk confidently about hype, about her, the internals of Hyperledger. But I do know, like, since that's been published, There's actually been quite a lot of interesting work moving on from just looking at kind of key value stores, like, okay.Cassandra, for example, I know that Cassandra's mostly written in Java, is it, is it not? It's primarily on the G JVM, right?Sara Bergman: I think so. Yes.Chris Adams: Yeah. I know that there is, there's essentially one, a kind of technique that I've seen relatively new, which I'm. I think I'm borrowing a term that IBM coined about a decade ago called scale in which I think is really interesting because it's essentially creating a API compatible implementation of an existing piece of software that is much, much more efficient in many cases.So the canonical example would be say, ScyllaDB it's written in a very particular kind of C++ uses like a shared nothing kind of architecture. That basically means that it's. API compatible, but quite a bit faster. And, and as a result, you're able to kind of run the same workloads on a, on a fraction of the kind of resources.And this is one thing that I've seen. And I'd be really curious about seeing some of that. Well, seeing that study rerun again, because you see that this is a pattern that I've. Seen once. And, uh, I think there are actually other examples. If you do stuff with SQL light these days, there's one called duck DB, which essentially lets you do the kind of large scale or medium data analytics these days, but onto something which is running in a single process.There's a bunch of really interesting stuff in this field right now, actually.Sara Bergman: Yeah. And, and I think what, what you said there in the middle was the sort of key, I think performance might not be an immediate. Into sustainability and green software, but the, the packed tighter is, is the keyboard here. Cuz if you use fewer CPU cycles, while you have more free CPU cycles to use for other things, that means you can use less resources.So that's why we write efficiency is very important. That's also, when we look at machine learning, for example, the training. Time. So the latency you have for that is a very interesting factor for sustainability. And there's been papers published on this to support. It's just not my opinion, other smarter people's opinions as well.Chris Adams: All right. I'm glad you mentioned the papers thing because Luis, this is actually one thing that I was gonna, I'll just ask you about the course. We spoke mostly about energy efficiency, so far as one or resource efficiency, but like, you know, hardware usage, for example, do. Have have students have had had much luck understanding one of the other pillars, the idea of like carbon efficiency or being able to change the intensity of the resources you might use.Cuz this is one thing that is relatively new and it's something we've spoken about and where you can use some tools for this. Like what time, for example, to see. How green energy might be. And I wanna name shook a couple of papers, which have been doing some really, really cool stuff in this, but I figured it might be ask worth asking you how students respond to this part here.Or if that even shows up in the course.Luis Cruz: Yeah. So I, I was not very long on the, when I talked about units, but we have a. A single class dedicated to units on energy efficiency. And we start with the energy consumption, of course, power consumption, but then we go all the way to, to the data center level in which we no longer think only about energy efficiency, but we also need to think about the carbon footprint carbon.I. The carbon consumption. What does it mean to be carbon efficient? I mean, what is exactly carbon, right? It's not only about CO2. It's also about all the other CO2 equivalent cases. And, and this, this kind of thing is not clear to everyone, even to me, sometimes I need to go back to the, my documentation and check whether I get the definitions.Right. So. one class is fully to it, but one cool thing is after, after this class, I think most students got it right? If not everyone. So, so one part of the course is you need to come up with a project that revolves around the tool that will help software engineers build energy efficient software. Or sustainable software, I'd say.And one of the projects that was developed by one of the groups was a scheduler of software tasks that will take into account the carbon footprint or the carbon intensity of the grid. So that means that when you are scheduling a task, you can say this task takes two hours, but I don't mind waiting 10 hours to get the result.And then based on this, the scheduler would check what would be the best time to run this task. And this is a very simple idea that is based on a paper from Google. If I'm not mistaken where they have carbon aware data centers in it, they basically decide when a particular task can be run or not, but they have a very complex setup and these students thought, okay, that's a really cool idea.It works for large organizations, but why not give. The power of these idea tools, just the ordinary software developer, that, that also wants to do something around these lines. So they created the very basic tool. I can share the link to it. It's a prototype of course, because they only had four weeks to develop it.But you, you basically just. Define, what is the common you wanna execute? What is your time constraints? And there you go. We have a carbon efficient, uh, execution, and I find it quite cool. Uh, another thing, if you, if you allow me, Chris, and since we mentioned blockchain and energy efficiency in the same paragraph, and usually get a lot of people angry about it, regardless of the, uh, The idea or opinion we have about it.I just wanted to say that, although I'm not against blockchain, I, I think we, we need blockchain, but that also means that we need energy efficiency in blockchain. So we, we need energy efficiency and blockchain and the same paragraph more often, and we need to have constructive conversations. So we need everyone, even the ones that.Getting rich with Bitcoins. We need all these people to, to, to think about how to solve this problem, because this is a real problem. And, and I'm gonna stop here. I don't want angry people around there.Chris Adams: Okay. Well, there's one thing that you've actually pointed to. One thing you've mentioned. I mean, if with your position, as a professor, I'm being able to like, have some influence on new developers and new new engineers, I'll happily let you give you that platform to like, say that. Yeah. You should probably be caring about that because.Yeah. I mean, this is actually one thing we were talking about before Sara, you mentioned one of the reasons you chose to study what you studied on your masters was because there was some influence from one of your professors and they kind of like gave you some of the space to even think about this stuff.And maybe you might would like explain that, cuz that was a really nice story. I thought.Sara Bergman: Yeah, absolutely. And I touched briefly on it in, in earlier as well, but this green, it course that I was able to take in my fourth year. Actually, it, it really opened my eyes also to this concept of the duality of it. Like we've talked about in this podcast, not only that you can use software for good purposes, but the software itself actually comes from somewhere and, and data centers are huge when.If you've never been to a data center, it's kind of hard to fathom. Like they're very fussy in like concept, at least to me, like if you come from a kind of normal non-data science background as a kid, which most kids do field trips to data centers, aren't that common yet, then it can be hard to understand just how big this impact can be.Around the time I took this course, it was at the time relatively new paper. And I was like older paper that compared the carbon footprint of the ICT sector and placed the dust at 2%, which was the same as aviation. And that's a number I still see quoted over and over and over again because it's so impactful.Cuz we talk a lot about aviation, but we talk less, but not more about. So, yeah. Simin who was the professor of that course and Mikael Asplund, who is on the big influence from Linköping university in Sweden. They were my supervisor and oh, I dunno the English word for it. Whoever approves your master thesis person.Luis Cruz: Maybe promoter.Sara Bergman: yeah, possibly that's the word I'll I'll I'll address you. Yeah. To give me the space to, to explore this deep end and they have done more research on energy EF. later as well. And I think it, it is so important to have that influence when you are sort of mallable I guess you never stop being mallable, but you're truly mallable at university.So I am forever grateful to having had that opportunity so early. And actually my university enforces you, everyone has to take one course that has a sustainability topic. You cannot graduate until you've done that. Which also think is a good way. Cuz there are like, for some reason, some political. Tied into this, which I personally, I think is unnecessary, but there are for some people, but this way is a good way to make sure everyone at least gets a baseline of knowledge,Chris Adams: All right. So we're coming up to last, like say a few minutes of the episode. So I figured while we're talking about some of the people whose work that's. who you'd recommend or point people to. And what add is it Simin? TU? I need you to pronounce it one time. Cause I'm not very good at that name. I'm sorry.Sara Bergman: Simin Nadjm-TehraniChris Adams: okay. Well make sure that's definitely in the show notes because that's, there's definitely worth looking at well we're here. I'm Luis. Is there any, are there any people you'd recommend or you think is whose work. Suggest people look up because there's a couple of names that I found really interesting of late, and I figure this might be a nice way to kind of wrap up with a top topic of pedagogy and learning from existing state of the art.For example.Luis Cruz: Yeah, I, I, I can, on top of my head, I can think of two rock stars. Elina Eriksson. She's an associate professor KTH. She has been awarded a number of times for her work on a education of sustainable software. Sustainable I CT in the universities and of course, Patricia Lago from view Amsterdam. She's one of the first researchers in green software in our software engineering C.So, if you want to have an interesting landscape of, or, or, or a role model for research and education on sustainable software engineering, they are definitely, uh, worth, uh, follow.Chris Adams: All right. I'll add a couple because just recently. There was a series of conferences. The ACM had a conference specifically about energy and there was one paper, which was co-authored. I think Colleen Josephson was the, uh, one of the lead authors. She did some really interesting stuff about this whole idea about like your student mentioned about moving.Uh, basically, uh, time shifting compute in various places. That was one thing that I found really fascinating, and that was actually actually talking about, okay, she works at VM where these are the numbers we've sat, we we've seen and been able to use. And here's how we're actually where to productionize some of this stuff.And the other work that I think is really interesting, I'm probably gonna, uh, mispronounce her name as well. And I'm so sorry, uh, for the author, I think it's Bilge, Bilge Acun or. Um, there was a work called carbon Explorer, which is both online on GitHub and is also a really fascinating paper that was also presented at that conference, which I think is consider as like one of the state-of-the-art things here.Actually, I found it really, really worth looking through, because once again, this was someone who's worked doing some work at Facebook, looking at the ways that they're able to achieve the targets. Carbon reduction year on year going through this. And they both looked at the load shifting part. They looked at using mixing in renewables and they actually put together a server to, for each, each, every single data center.Talk about what the optimal mix was for each of these. I've never seen that work before and it's really, really worth looking. And I've when I looked up at work, there's like just so much there to look at. It's so nice seeing that stuff in the open. Sara, I wanna give you kind of the last, the last word on this, cuz I'm sure there's some other people who've, who've actually found interesting or whose work.I know fan of, or you direct people's eyes to, I supposeSara Bergman: Absolutely Sabine Canditt she recently wrote a book. It's in German. So sadly I can't read it, but I've had the synopsis explain to me. And she, she talked to me about the book I was interviewed also for it. Hannah Smith is another great educator. Who's involved in climate action, tech and green tech Southwest, I believe is the community.And also Sandra Pallinger from, from Microsoft. Who's also involved in climate action tech, who I really.Chris Adams: I didn't know that you were gonna mention Hannah, but, uh, the thing I probably need to say is that Hannah recently joined, uh, the organization, a work app called the Green Web Foundation. And she's now heading up all the training. So I'm, I really glad, happy to hear that. You've mentioned that because yeah, she's working on a bunch of that stuff.So if this is interesting, 21, who's listening then. Well, I guess there's a plug Luis. I feel a bit embarrassed about mention talking about our own organization here. So I'm probably gonna. Try and leave the last word with you about this, because you've mentioned this course. If people do wanna find out more about this work that you're doing, or some of the other output that you are, you'd like to kind of people to look at, is there a particular website or is there a space you'd share?Cuz we'll share the link to the, the, the engineering course, but there may be other things that you wanna draw people's attention to for.Luis Cruz: Yeah. I mean, definitely. If you wanna have a quick start on sustainable software engineering, please do share the link at the end of the podcast podcast. I'm not gonna say it out loudly, but please do check it. I also write frequently. So if you check my personal website, I have a blog where I try to write the same content of the course, but in a way that is more friendly for the internet reader.so I try to write it in the form of blog posts. So if, if you wanna reach out, of course, you can also follow me on Twitter, please. I'm Cruz, and I'm more than happy to interact to, to hear any thoughts or any feedback about the course. If there are more ideas. That are more content that I should add, please let me know.And I'm, I'm making this request not only to salary increase, but to anyone out there, because I think this is how we can evolve and how we can change our software industry.Chris Adams: Cool. Thank you, Luis.. Well, I think that's taken us up to the time we have left available. Sara. Luis. Thank you so much for joining. Yeah. Have a lovely evening or morning wherever you're in the world. Okay. Take care. Hey everyone. Thanks for listening. Just a reminder to follow Environment Variables on apple podcasts, Spotify, Google podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.And please do leave a rating and review. If you like what we're doing, it helps other people discover the show. And of course we'd love to have more listeners. To find out more about the Green Software Foundation, please visit greensoftware.foundation that's greensoftware.foundation in any browser.Thanks again, and see you in the next episode.

This episode is taken from a recent panel discussion from the Green Software Foundation’s Global Summit of 2022. EV regulars, Chris Adams and Asim Hussain are joined by Anne Currie, Chris Lloyd-Jones and Elise Zelechowski as they discuss Accessibility and Green Software. What’s driving interest in Green Software? What ESG principles are being adopted by companies and what is needed to drive accountability and accessibility in this sphere? Where does the main driver for Green Software come from within an organisation?Learn more about our guests:Chris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / WebsiteAnne Currie: LinkedIn / Website Asim Hussain: LinkedIn / TwitterChris Lloyd-Jones: LinkedIn / TwitterElise Zelechowski: LinkedIn Episode resources:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter Green Software Foundation SummitThe Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!Policy: Blaue Engel / Blue AngelIf you enjoyed this episode then please either:Follow, rate, and review on Apple PodcastsFollow and rate on SpotifyConnect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!Transcription below:Elise Zelechowski: I am excited about the Green Software Foundation for the very reason that I think this is about a movement of technologists who are really sort of coming up with innovative creative ways to address this problem. And so the way we need to take this forward is get CIOs to the table and say, now, how do we sort of come together and think about mutual benefit?How do we sort of make this a systems approach within the organization to tackle all the different parts that we need to tackle?Asim Hussain: Hello and welcome to Environment Variables. Brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discussed the latest news and events surrounding green software. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software and your host Asim Hussain.Chris Skipper: Hey everyone. Chris, the producer of Environment Variables here with a quick note to say that the following episode of the podcast was taken from a panel discussion from the recent Green Software Foundation global summit. If you would like to hear and see an unfiltered raw version of this discussion, head on over to our YouTube channel and look for the video entitled GSF global summit closing ceremony, 2022.In fact, I'll do you one better and add a link below in the show notes of the podcast. So head there, click the link and you can check out not only that discussion, but all the other episodes of the Environment Variables podcast too. Now on with the show.Asim Hussain: Welcome, my name Is Asim Hussain and I'm excited today to host a panel with guests from the Green Software Foundation.Chris Lloyd-Jones: I'm Chris Lloyd-Jones.Chris Adams: Hi there. My name's Chris Adams. Oh, sorry, Anne.Anne Currie: hi, I'm Anne Currie.Elise Zelechowski: Hi, Elise Zelechowski.Asim Hussain: Awesome. I've got some wonderful, uh, interesting questions, hopefully for all of you. And I'd love to hear your opinions. Very interesting topics around green software. My first question is, you know, what's driving, I personally have experienced a lot more interest in this space in kind of the last year, at the very least.What do you, think's driving interest in green software in, across the industry, Chris Lloyd-Jones. Why don't you go ahead with that one.Chris Lloyd-Jones: So for me, I think it's the growing understanding from individuals that our way of life needs to be greener, to be sustainable and be resilient. And now there's a lot of talk from governments and around setting targets and policies, and those are very important, but green software lets every individual make an impact and make a difference, which I think is a differentiator from all the other initiatives that are going.Asim Hussain: Mm. Yeah, really good point. I, I, I feel there's a ground spell movement across the world as well. Yes. Elise, what's your, what's your thoughts on that? On that question?Elise Zelechowski: I would, I would echo that and just say, I mean, I think that technologists today are, are, are growing up with more and more real sort of impacts from climate change. They're seeing them manifested in ways that are really impacting how they experience the world around them and how they think about their future.And organizations like the Green Software Foundation that really provide a forum to take action and to feel like you have agency to really make a change and sort of really not just make a change broadly, but make a change in what you're building every day really gives people a sense of the power to change.And I think that that is one of the, the most exciting things about the, the Green Software Foundation. I also just think that, you know, Organizations are increasingly adopting ESG frameworks. I think there's more and more accountability expectations around that. And of course, organizations that, that have an outsized emissions footprint from their it right, are gonna be looking at green software as one of the big opportunities to make an impact.Asim Hussain: Wonderful that, that that's. Yeah, that's definitely aligned to my thinking as well. So given the fact that organizations. You know, they're interested in green software, but they need to adopt, you know, processes, principles, patterns of, of engineering in order to greenify their, their software and reduce the emissions of software, what what's needed in your mind for organizations to, to adopt these patterns and principles, Chris Adams.What's your thoughts in that area?Chris Adams: So what really, our big, big one, right. Is capacity, like organizations having the skills in house to do this. And you know how, when like Ruby rails might have come out and then people are saying, I want a Ruby rails developer with 10 years experience. When the frameworks only a year old, we are kind of seeing something a little bit like that right now, where various organizations are trying to hire and ask for this stuff.And they're not quite sure what they're after and we have this kind of shortage right now. So if anything, there's a real. Need to have some kind of way to provide, to kind of get this level of, of, of skill and competency up quite high, actually. And, and, well, I think this is something you've spoken about quite a lot, actually, as.Anne Currie: Yes. Yeah. Cause we have to make sure that being green doesn't conflict with developer productivity in anybody's mind, because in the end developer productivity will always win. There are hardly any developers that compared to how many we need in the industry, we need more. And so everybody wants to use them to deliver on business goals, not kind.Climate goals really. So one thing that I think will really help and is definitely helping at the moment is where you get open source or cloud providers who are offering services that are both good for developer productivity and also greener. The more we can, we can raise the profile of that and push it.The more likely we are to get, take up, because what we cannot ask people to do, because they will not do it. I've asked them so many times over the years, we can't get people to rewrite their applications in sea or rust or making things more efficient is too expensive for people in terms of time. So we need to find services that will do it for them, make it the, the default, make it no or effort for them, or in fact less effort for them to choose those solutions.Asim Hussain: Know, I do. I do think that one of the challenges is that we're either talking about software that hasn't been written. and the vast majority of software, which needs to be written has not been written yet. We are very, very early stages in this whole industry we're in right now, but there is also this legacy software that exists that we just have to figure out how do we manage that?And rewriting that in a new language is not an option that, you know, that flies these days, but there is new development's happening, or maybe some of that stuff will. Will fly. Who made those choices early on? One of the things Chris, I just thought, I D dunno if you have any opinions on this or whether you've seen anything else on the horizon.I, I was very, very delighted to see, I think just yesterday, the day before there were, there are several, you know, job roles out there. I saw some for Amazon. Of a sustainable solutions architect and I'm starting to see a more and more and more. And I know some of your organizations have roles, you know, with the title, agreeing the title.I mean, what's, what do you see in terms of the job market regarding kind of our space? Do you see a lot of growth in this area?Chris Adams: is definitely interest in this often at a kind of executive level and often at a kind of developer on the, kind of in the trenches level. But. The part in the middle people, aren't quite sure how to kind of prioritize it or even ask for, or even specify it right now. So like people asking, well, how do I buy a green, a greener version of any kind of service right now?There's a real gap there right now. And I think even at the architectural level, we don't really have the language yet. Or it's not that common to really kind of talk about the trade offs you might be doing. So like, I could do one thing here, which takes advantage of how the energy markets have totally changed over the last 10 years to, to change the economics.Right. But I dunno how to talk about the, the tradeoffs that might be, that I might make in order to unlock that stuff. And I think you kind of need this capacity or these abilities at the design level right now, before you can kind of get to the implementation part. That's what I feel is a real kind of.Gap right now until we have like an iron triangle for things like greener software, for example, or this stuff here. I think we're gonna struggle to have like, informed decisions about how you're gonna spend a developer's time budget or an actual cash money budget on things. That's probably one of the big gaps I see in the next six to 12 months, that needs to be kind of plugged, I suppose.Chris Lloyd-Jones: I just wanna weigh in on the chasm there. One thing that I've noticed is that some organizations are starting to see this as an either or that you either focus on sustainability in your business model and secular economy, or you do green software. Whereas actually the personas and the people doing these things are very different.I think you can have sustainability in your technology and sustainability with technology. And I think organizations don't need to take that kind of zero sum approach to focusing on where they need to change.Asim Hussain: great point, great point. And I think that's that's. The interesting question is, is. There is a gap. There's a gap between different types of roles, but there's also a gap between, as you mentioned, Chris CIO to, to, to in the trenches, they're in the middle, there's kind of this, this knowledge gap. And once that gets filled, then the rest of the roles and the understanding will spread throughout an organization.But then that leads to one of my favorite questions, which is where will change come from? I think there's been lots. Attention thought strategy attempts in the past, going kind of top down, CIO CEO, down to the, down to the further down organization. And there's been other attempts going from maybe more. I call it in the trenches on the front lines, let's say, oh God.So all these awful war metaphors, we need to stop using them up, up, up, up the chain. Where do you think the kind of main driver for adoption of green software come from? Which direction I'm gonna ask at least this question first.Elise Zelechowski: Yeah. I mean, I think that's, that's right. Sort of one of the unique features of, and, and, and, and there is theory of change right at the Green Software Foundation is that we can create kind of a groundswell movement here of technologists who are really driving, driving change. But of course there needs to be support structures in place, right.And there needs to be enablement from CIOs and other members of the team. And to the point that was just made. You know, there needs to be kind of a systems approach. Think about things as integrated, right? This is not, you know, an either or scenario. We need to kind of look at strategies that embed sustainability approaches throughout the entire space within the company.But I think that CIOs are increasingly understanding that they play a role in an organization's sustainability ambitions. I think, as I mentioned earlier, I think ESG is, is part of that regulation sort of driving. Expectations around environmental performance. But I think that I am excited about the Green Software Foundation for the very reason that I think this is about a movement of technologists who are, are really sort of coming up with innovative creative ways to address this problem.And so. The next sort of step or the, the way we need to take this forward is, is get CIOs to the table and say, now how do we sort of come together and think about mutual benefit? How do we sort of make this a systems approach within the organization to tackle all the different parts that we need to tackle?Asim Hussain: Yeah, a holistic approach. We need everybody at the table, but yeah, they're definitely there. The, I know you have certain opinions.Anne Currie: do I, I'm a big, I'm a big believer in the middle. Managers as being the, kind of the secret key to this, because 10 years ago in the financial services industry, when they wanted to try and stop everybody being Cowboys, and there'd just been a huge financial crash, whatever, and they wanted everybody's behave a bit better.They realized that actually the key to that was the middle managers because. People at the bottom have, might have enthusiasm, but they didn't really have the power to make any changes. And they were all together. They didn't how to do it. People at the top would quite often get on board and say, yeah, we wanna do this.But everybody assumed they were just lying in the middle and would just stamp on all the projects as soon as they, they go anywhere. So we it's, it's kind of senior architects, middle manager, other, otherwise they have a tendency to just kill everything. For good reason, because they know that loads of projects get kicked off that are actually banned for the business.And their job is usually to keep the business alive and running and, and operating and not easily. No, not because somebody's NA the CEO's neighbors once said that they thought this was a good idea. So everybody has to drop everything and do it. They're there to protect from that and, and kill those projects.So we need to persuade them. Otherwise everything's killed is stone dead. So yeah, we need it's. As Elise said, it's holistic. Everybody has to be convinced and we can't leave them to the end or they'll stop.Asim Hussain: to Anne, we should fire all the CIOs and middle management jobs to say no. Got it.Um, Chris Adams, were you about to put your hand up?Chris Adams: Yeah was indeed. Yeah, like a little school, boy. I think there's actually. I think it's worth looking at the role that policy makers have been playing in this in there. And we can also look to other places where people started introducing things like what you might refer to as well. Not really non-functional requirements, but like other kind of key kind of indicators of quality.And you might think about things like, say accessibility, if you look how accessibility was something, which is now become relatively mainstream in terms of like working. Yeah. You had a push. At a kind of regulatory level where people would say every single website built with public sector money now has to meet a minimum level, but you also needed something like ways to convert those ideas into something that people can act upon.Like, if you have like a Web content, accessibility guidelines, you got poor, which is like, you know, perceivable. Understandable robust. You kind of need something like that for green software right now to make it a bit easier for people to manage success in this. And so like basically a product manager or someone is able to kind of accept something and say, yeah, this is actually meeting these criteria here.And right now, We don't quite have that, but it'll be really lovely to have something like that to make it a bit easier for the people who are at that mid-level to essentially guide people along the way, or at least tell when something is actually hitting the targets, they think it's supposed to be hitting, for example.Asim Hussain: We need a C level to say, yes, we need the middle middle management say yes, but also have the knowledge and the tools and the information to be able to guide and drive and, and, and drive work in, in, in the right direction. I also think it's interesting about the accessibility aspect of it. A lot of people assume that, you know, a lot of accessibility arguments.Don't have financial benefits. There's huge financial benefits to accessibility arguments mean it's like on some circumstances, it's, you know, significant percentage of your customer base is someone who is, you know, differently. And because it can also be temporal as well, like cuz you can, you know, Maybe have a baby.So if you don't have a one arm for like six months. Yeah. Well, this is the thing actually seemed like, I mean, so Microsoft did have some stuff like this, which is quite helpful when they spoke about things like situational positional kind of disabilities that is actually really useful in having the vocabulary to actually realize that there are benefits in lots of other places.We don't quite have that language in. Technology right now, but it does exist. People do talk about co-benefits all the time. You can talk about greening electricity, for example, and saving literally millions of lives each year, that would otherwise be cut short with like particulate matter. There's all these things you can talk about.And there's arguments you can make to say, well, maybe your staff might wanna hang around more. If they feel like they're part of the good side. For with using advanced humane things, rather than this really, really weird 20th century kind of stuff from before. There's all this stuff that we could be talking about.And I don't know about you, but I think most developers would rather build star treks than build mad max and.Chris Lloyd-Jones: I'd say that even with the code benefits you're talking about, I mean, that's kind of the values driven. It is the right thing to do. I think the thing around green software, there's almost a pragmatic business case without kind of wanting to relate everything back to money. If you reduce electricity in a data center, you reduce spend, right?If you reduce consumption in the cloud, you reduce, spend as much as I think we should do this. Cuz it's the right thing to do. If it does come down to a business case for the bottom line for the pound, the dollar, the Euro. There's also, it can be a very strong, almost linear correlation between reduced carbon and reduced money.And you can invest that in training, I think to then help those middle managers stop squatting all these projects. Yeah.Elise Zelechowski: Yeah, no, that's right. The optimization is, is key. And I think that gets back to that point where, you know, companies with sort of outside impact from their, it are moving more quickly to kind of look at where those opportunities are. Right. There's sort of environmental benefits. Right. But there's also that, that big cost saving opportunity when you take this on.Yeah, absolutely.Chris Adams: this is the thing, though. Again, we can look from other sectors that do things like this. Like if you value. Then you can literally value it. You can price it. Like you see organizations doing this all the time. Like I'm gonna point to Microsoft because they have done things like this. They have like an internal carbon price.So you've got a kind of carbon war chest for this cool green stuff. But they've also got things to say, well, maybe there's something which is the. Actually we're struggling to kind of bring down the emissions, right? For example, like an aviation, that's got a different internal carbon price. So you can price things to actually do this.And like, this is literally what Boeing have been doing for like 20 to 30 years to achieve weight savings. They basically automatically give any engineer a kind of. Budget that they're, they're able to spend to buy weight savings. And I think you can do these kind of, if there's all these management patterns that are, that are like used lots of places, which would work really well in this field.And now I'm gonna hand to Anne, cuz I think she's got something to say here asAnne Currie: Yeah, because I, I totally disagree with all of you. So, so this is a good thing on the panel. I totally disagree with you. I don't think, I don't think cost savings sell to enterprises because they don't because for. Them the cost of developers exceeds cost of operating data. They, that's why they move to the cloud, cuz they're willing to pay more in order to give their developers less work to do so.I don't think that's an, an argument that lad, how having said that, I think it is an argument that that can be made and it is convincing if you operate a data center because there electricity cost is a really key part of your business costs. So aviation. Aviation fuel is a really key part of your business cost.You will go outta business if aviation fuel, if you spend too much on aviation fuel, but it's not, you will not go out business in the tech industry because you spend too much money on your data center. You go out business because you key business would a business, whatever it is, isn't generating the income you want it to.It's not your number one priority.Chris Lloyd-Jones: I think it depends on who you're speaking to though the C-suite level, for sure. That's not gonna make an impact, but again, I'm gonna use your analogy of middle managers. If you are looking at your spend and you look to what the spend was before, and you are seeing your use of function. An Azure or Orlando function, spiking.And you see your app services. I think even if it might not materially impact the business, those people panic. So having a way to see that they can keep their cost in check. Then also, I guess, sell upwards, manage upwards that they're being green, doing the right things. I'm not actually saying it's a key business driver that helps those people make decisions, which might be a bit Machavellian.MaybeAsim Hussain: think, I think it's a co-benefit. And I think that's one of the things there has to be. There's multiple vectors in making decisions. I think I do. I do agree with Anne to a certain degree that I think if it's the only yard when you're putting forward, it won't, it won't land. But if you're saying it's, it's got this benefit, this benefit, this benefit, it is greener.It's faster. It's more reliable. All those things added together. I do think, I do think it adds it's not nothing.Chris Adams: When I talk about pricing something, I'm not necessarily saying the cost of a computer, for example, you can cost things in all these different. And there's a whole set of management theory, all around cost of delay, which is like, what is the cost of, of us not shipping this product, for example, the day before, okay, let's choose a bad example like black Monday or something like that.Right. That is a clear cost of doing that. Right. And that's what I'm talking about. We price things accordingly. And if you're able to talk about this and, and then, and if you, if you accept that in many cases, organizations are driven by numbers. If you can translate these into that, Incredibly reductive single one dimension that helps you get, make it argue for something.Then I think that's actually useful and we have patterns for doing this kind of stuff. So it's not necessarily the cost of compute. It's the cost of the opportunity cost of what you could be doing. Otherwise, for example, you can express these in numerical form and people make lots and lots of money building models and designing that and managing this way anyway.So I think that you could apply this to carbon because there are absolutely. Consequences while the science spells out, there are consequences for us not pricing in carbon into how we work.Asim Hussain: If you're working for a for-profit organization, it's it's money it's, you know, that, that's what that's the purpose of the organization is to, is to make a profit it's a for-profit organization, but there's other aspects of the world. You know, we have these free markets, but then we, hopefully we have regulations and regulatory authorities that work that temper and control the access is perhaps of, of a free market economy.So we talked a lot about, you know, if, if there was just the money argument, Just the market driven money argument, you know, what, what, what could happen? What are some regulatory policies that if it, if they came out would help accelerate the adoption of not just green software, but you know, more sustainable tech solutions.Anne Currie: Cast our mind back that we talked earlier about accessibility and, and you know, that that that's useful for generating additional customers and things. But actually, I, I, I remember at the time I was head of it for a company and the main argument for why we should make the site accessible. Was that the SEO was better.Google used to give you an SEO boost if you were accessible. And that was one of the key performance indicators that they had, which was where are you in Google? That was a top line item for every C-suite business discussion. So you could easily say, well, we have to be accessible because it'll move us.Through Google. And that was the reason why, you know, it was clearly measurable thing. And I think people really cared about, and I also used to work for companies like Microsoft and for them, the reason to go for accessibility was that there were government mandates on accessibility standards that a lot of applications had to pass.So that was, well, you just cannot sell into the us government, which is a key customer that you want, if you don't meet these levels. So if we had. Something like that again, that would be effective, um, in the past that was effective and I think it would be effective again. So how do we get those kind of like both business?So Google provided the push through the SEO and government provided the push through. You have to have these meet these standards in order to sell to us. And that was effective.Chris Adams: like this is currently happening in Germany and in Hong Kong we're already. So I think last month, the first ever eco certified software was granted. Blauer angle or Blauer Engel certificate. And one of the reasons that people were doing that was because in government, which had many cases have legally binding targets to reduce emissions, they need to have a thing to ask for.So now you see that and there is now a German project called software. Which is like soft aware, but with a kind of German accent, what that does, that's basically something a bit like continuous integration checking every single time. Are, are you making, are you moving forward or moving backwards in terms of the actual missions associated with any of the things you're doing?So there are loads of efforts like this, but it's still early days. There's Germany and there's Hong Kong, but no one else has new certifications yet. But there's like a loose network of like 28 different countries who are trying to figure out what to be asking for so that when they put a big fat procurement tender in, they can say, I need this to be, I don't know, instead of perceivable, operable understandable and oh, Christ robust, maybe green, open, lean, decentralized gold, something like that.We need to have things like that for it really.Elise Zelechowski: And I'll just add, I think that's, I mean, that's right. The role of the Green Software Foundation, right. Is, is we have this forum to help drive and sort of bring kind of. It right to this question of like, what does good look like and what should we be really aiming for as a community? And our, I think our approach and our processes, you know, are based on transparent principles, right?And, and really about let's get everyone at the table and really talk about this in an open forum. And so I think that regulation is key, but we need to sort of get to a place where we start to, to drive that alignment on, Hey, this is kind of a good stand and keep building. As you say, Chris, more sort of visibility awareness in the.Asim Hussain: Yeah. Wonderful. So it's even when it comes to government influence, it's still, still going back to money, cuz it's like, where, where is the government gonna spend its money? But I think that will evolve to something hopefully a bit closer to policy regulation. And I would also say that, you know, Google, the Google SEO example, that was a Google policy.It was a decision that they made not, I dunno, we probably had some, I don't know the background of that decision, so I'm just guessing, but it was this decision that they made, which drove a lot of action from a lot of organizations. And that's why these things are such great levers to, to pull because it's a small change can have a big impact as we're kind of reaching to the end of the, of the, of the panel.We might have gone over a little bit. But I just wanted to ask each of you, you know, what advice do you have for someone looking to start having conversations regarding green software in inner roles, or even just in their communities? Let's start with you, Chris. Lloyd-Jones. Do you have any advice for people?Chris Lloyd-Jones: me. It be about identifying that business case to support green software, but also understanding your culture. I mean, focusing again, gonna repeat it on that management example. I do think you need to know what your organization's motivated by and be quite honest about that. If you are a pragmatic organization cost or one of the other drivers, Chris mentioned will be important for some organizations, it being the right thing to do will be enough to start these conversations.We need that organizational support to have that driver support adoption. You also need a sponsor. Cause without that, buy-in, it will be difficult to encourage teams to actually adopt these new practices. Go out for training. Like, like Anne was saying, if you're taking away from developer productivity, there has to be a really strong reason for that.So that's the top down. I think the other thing I would say to start having conversations would be grassroots advocacy, meet the like-minded individuals. Those would be my two main.Anne Currie: Great piece of advice, Chris Anne, what's your thoughts? Well, my thought would be, remember you have consumer power, almost everyone in the tech industry has consumer power to make change. Yes. So when you are buying, when you are buying stuff or. When you're thinking about buying staff, talk to your suppliers and say, I care about this, and this will, this is something that will make the difference between whether I buy from you or I buy from somebody else, because if you can then get them to go and change their products either immediately, or just because it's the feedback they're getting from their customers that will have outside impacts without you having to do anything at all, or get any internal sign off.Just, just ask for it.Asim Hussain: Right. Absolutely. Use your wallet, Chris Adams. What's your thoughts?Chris Adams: I'm actually gonna agree with a lot of what Andrew said. There's a whole phenomena called the values perception gap. That's common in psychology, where everyone basically assumes that everyone. Doesn't care about anything until they ask them and realize that they do care about things. And like, until you do that and are explicit about that, or explicitly give a team permission to do this, or explicitly talk to someone, they'll basically assume that you do not care.And if you don't do that, then. Well, we are kind of here because everyone is assuming that no one else cares and no one is prepared to ask, like, can you please do to our provider or Hey team, do you reckon people might wanna join us? If like we were, what some, we look more like the good guys, rather than the bad guys, there's all this stuff that we could be doing.And I feel like a lot of time is basically be very explicit about this, about what you're after and what your values actually are lead with your values in many cases. But back 'em up with some numbers that you can come up to justify when someone is asking when someone is challenging, you, you later.Asim Hussain: Yeah. And I will, I will just add to the, I do work for one of those large cloud providers and I will, I will. That the sales org, they do. It is flagged. It is put in a database when a customer reaches out and complains about anything. But like specifically there's a there's, you know, if, if the request or suggestion is around sustainability, it is flagged then is go.It does go in a database, which is brought up in discussions, at least with you, like, what are your, what's your, what's your guidance?Elise Zelechowski: Yeah, I, I would say all, all great points and all part of the kind of systems thinking that needs to be applied here of sort of activating right. Sort of different stakeholders and levers within an organization. You know, I can speak, you know, you know, specifically to, to ThoughtWorks, you know, one of the things that I have found, you know, we are a very decentralized culture, wherever agile culture, and it's.So important for us to find champions in different parts of the business and then do the education and training and bring them along. And, and we've learned a lot from our participation already in the, in the foundation, but just getting enough people who are starting to spread the word, you know, sort of in a frankly, in a grassroots, right.Sort of like pollinating different parts of the business. So you have. Suddenly you have this sort of like, oh, I'm hearing about this over here. Oh. And I'm hearing about this over there. And then as you're sort of building that business case that Chris is talking about, you know, and putting this together, you've already sort of primed the organization culturally and kind of gotten enough momentum building that, that it, I feel like you can just move then more quickly and get gain more momentum.But definitely I, I feel like that grass. Piece has been very important at ThoughtWorks, even though we're a very purpose led company, it's just the, the way our organization works. You need to kind of do that pollination.Asim Hussain: I would, I would absolutely agree with you. I think that we, one of the things people don't realize about Microsoft is it has one of the largest kind of green teams of any organization in the world. I think we're almost 6,000 people now in the organization kind of actively sit and participate and talk and, and, and make it very, very clear that sustainability is a value to them.And. I think that's a strong signal to everybody else in an organization. So the middle management and the CIOs CTOs and the CIOs that, you know, they to make a decision around sustainability would be, it would be supported. So, um, yeah, absolutely. I agree with all of you, all of your opinions. Thank you.Thank you. All of you. Thank you all for being part of this panel and thank you for being part of the foundation, your guidance and support. And your knowledge is instrumental in us achieving our mission and our goals. Thank you. Wonderful. Thanks so much. Hey everyone. Thanks for listening. Just a reminder to follow Environment Variables on apple podcasts, Spotify, Google podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Please do leave a rating and review. If you like what we're doing, it helps other people discover the show. And of course we want more listeners to find out more about the Green Software Foundation.Please visit greensoftware.foundation. Thanks again, and see you in the next episode.

This week Asim Hussain and Chris Adams are joined by Sara Bergman of Microsoft and Henry Richardson of Wattime.org to discuss the current global surge in oil and gas prices. Why is  the price of oil and gas so damn high at the moment?  How does intermittency influence the price surge? Are high gas prices actually good for society as a whole? How does Green Software come into play? All this including a wrap-up of the Green Software Foundation Summit.Learn more about our guests:Chris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / WebsiteSara Bergman: LinkedIn / TwitterAsim Hussain: LinkedIn / TwitterHenry Richardson: LinkedIn / WebsiteEpisode resources:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter Green Software Foundation SummitEvent: RIPE 84Organisation: The Rocky Mountain InstituteArticle: From Deep Crisis, Profound Change by Kingsmill Bond, Amory Lovins, Oleksiy Tatarenko, Jules Kortenhorst & Sam Butler-Sloss. Article: Understanding Energy Market Trends At The Layer Below the Internet Stack by the Green Software Foundation.Podcast: The Climate Fix: Transitioning heating to hydrogen w/ Professor Averil Macdonald OBEResource: Carbon Aware SDK by the Green Software Foundation.Book: Apocalypse Never by Michael SchellenbergerIf you enjoyed this episode then please either:Follow, rate, and review on Apple PodcastsFollow and rate on SpotifyConnect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!Transcription below:Chris Adams: We kind of do incentivize publicly traded companies like legally fiduciary responsibility wise to act a little bit like sociopaths. So we need to like hack that and do something about that. And like, this feels like maybe one way that you do need to resort to, but probably not the only one it's also useful to maybe talk about values.Because, well, I know I respond to values more than most people, and there's lots of research, which says lead with values, but follow up with numbers, if you're gonna try and get any of these changes to actually be implemented or to see any change within an organization.Asim Hussain: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discuss the latest news and events surrounding green software. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software.I'm your host. Asim Hussain.Chris Adams: So my name's Chris Adams, I'm the executive director of the green web foundation.Asim Hussain: My name's Asim Hussain. I'm the executive director of the green software foundation and the green cloud advocacy lead at Microsoft.Sara Bergman: My name is Sara Bergman. I am a software engineer at Microsoft. I'm the chair of the writer's project at the green software found.Henry Richardson: I'm Henry Richardson, an analyst at WattTime and also the chair of the specifications working group at the green software foundation.Chris Adams: Okay. So I suppose Asim, I figured we would spend the time today doing a brief recap from the GSF summit here. And I figured that would be a relatively easy thing to talk about because there have been like how many hours of programming now from various people over the last month has seen.Asim Hussain: I haven't got the stats yet, but there's quite a lot. There's quite a lot. I mean, it's 27, no, actually 20, 27 regions and 28 events cuz one region had two events over two days. So yeah, a lot of, a lot of people have been connecting and sitting and chatting and talking about green software. , which is just really incredible.Actually, I, you know, I, everybody was just working so, so hard to get the summit together, that to actually just sit there for a second and think that, wow, you know, people all around the world are now sitting down and having conversations about this topic. I don't know. It was really inspiring. One of my hopes for this podcast has always been like, just getting a bunch of people on and just talking about something that's happened recently that's of interest.And I think all of us kind of can have opinions on, on this topic. So I don't know. I mean, other than the foundation, other than the summit, because I think that Henry only took part in some of it and, and Sarah. Got hers canceled and I had a fraternity, so I kind of just checked out for most of it as well.so I didn't really like doing much. Is there another topic, like something happening in the news recently that, thatChris Adams: shit. There's loads. So in Europe you've seen a whole shift. This you've seen a kinda landmark rolling on things like right to. Hardware efficiency in that basically the Europe has decided to standardize on USBC for any kind of devices or devices for charging now. Right. So that totally affects that part of the S uh, of the se.All right, that's gonna have a meaningful impact impact. There also, you've seen a. Some similar model legislation come through on the U on the us level. Now that's been put forward to actually say, well, if they can do it, why can't we do it? So you may end up with the Brussels effect that was being referred to in the previous podcast about, well, okay, you set a decent default and then this ends up being something that ends up having a meaningful effect on the hardware.Part of a bunch of the tools that we do in the end user device part. That's actually one thing that I think is worth actually exploring.Asim Hussain: Yeah, I think, and I think GDPR has proven that, uh, something can happen from Europe and just, you know, affect the whole, the whole world, you know, like regulation from there. Cuz everybody has, is forced. Everybody's forced to kind of follow. Europe's such a huge market in the world, but if something happens in Europe, everybody else, everybody else has to follow suit.so, is that the only is that the only one is that the, I remember that the USBC came along and I'm, and I'm quite happy cuz I'm an Android user. So everything I, and at Android, Macs, everything I have is, is the USBC dramatically works.Chris Adams: works. Yeah.Sara Bergman: Also, but it might be too political, but we could talk about cutting off Russian gas and how that leads an energy shift in Europe.Asim Hussain: That's interesting.Chris Adams: Yeah, there's absolutely some fascinating stuff along that because, well, this is what I did. I did a talk at ripe RIPE 84, which is basically a event it's ripe is the European entity that issues IP addresses to people. And one thing that we were speaking about was, okay, well, what are the drivers that you might want to use to kind of.Be thinking about, be thoughtful about your, your source of energy. And if you look up over the last 10 years, basically the cost of renewables has fallen more or less tenfold. And particularly in Europe, I'm not sure in America quite so much, but because it's a global market and global commodity, you are seeing this like oil and gas is like 14 times more expensive now than it was 10 years ago.Right. So you basically have this scenario where something is either a 10th of the price or 14 times the price. And if you've been able to. Negotiate say green supply here you are exposed. You're not exposed to like 14 fold increase in your energy costs. So there's like one thing which you're totally seeing.And there is some fascinating research that's come out of the RMI, the Rocky mountain Institute, where they've spoken about how this war in the Ukraine has essentially sped up. A bunch of the existing predictions about how quickly you'll see various parts of the grid, decarbonize are on a global basis.So yeah, there's a bunch of stuff there, which will absolutely have a knock on effect to any large consumers of electricity, like data centers, which are in terms of energy usage per square foot. They're more dense than aluminums melt. And this is before we switch to kind of liquid calling, which is gonna increase the amount of energy per, per rack to be even even higher, because you can get away with it.When, whereas previously the limiting factor has been, is it possible to kind of cool this stuff down? If you have things like liquid calling, which could be maybe 10 to a hundred times more E. In terms of moving heat around, then that's gonna have a knock on effect in the energy density inside a given data center, for example, and therefore the marginal stuff, whichAsim Hussain: But going back to the point of the wall that's happening right now. So, so the Rocky Mountain Institute is, is this, cause I think there's, there's lots of mixed information out there. Cause I've heard, I've heard there's other, other things that have come along. So the RMI is saying that this is gonna help accelerate the energy transition, but I'm also reading things that, you know, in the hunt for energy independence for, for, for entities that they're going.On previous commitments to roll out renewables. And they're just, they're just rolling out gas and, and coal faster.Chris Adams: We might wanna speak to the expert here. Yeah.Henry Richardson: There were two, two things. I, the union of concerned scientists just came out with a report saying that natural gas, power plants are running at a loss, a financial loss kind of like coal was four or five years ago. Um, and so there it's following, following the same patterns where. It's uneconomic to run coal or natural gas at power plants at various times.So I think we're starting to see the same fossil trends emerge. It of course, leads to self dispatch and other. Out of market AER. And then we're also seeing, I think Biden instigated the, uh, defense production act for heat pump, hot water heaters. So I think there is a movement towards like accelerating some of the electrification fuel switching trends that everyone's been talking about for a long time, but we'll see if there's actual action on.Asim Hussain: if, if gas prices are increasing and that's making gas, power plants, less economical. I mean, I'm, I'm seeing my, my, my electricity prices increase. Isn't just gonna, just kind of, aren't just gonna pass them on to me and therefore we're just gonna pay for more gas and, and that's it.Henry Richardson: so renewable energy generators. There's a whole bunch of problems with supply chain issues, which are starting to get ironed out with the tariff reductions in the us at least. they are so financially viable because as the gas price of gas rises, the price of wholesale electricity also rises making it more attractive to build more wind farms and solar farms.So there's like, anecdotally, we've heard that traditionally, a lot of renewables in Europe and the us are purchased through power purchase agreements where there's a guaranteed off taker through a corporate partner. Anecdotally, we're hearing that a lot of the developers want to delay the start of their PPA.Because they're making so much money in the wholesale market in electricity right now, because they're able to produce power and make a significant profit, and they don't need the guaranteed price to put steel in the ground. So there's a lot of like, because it's pushing the price of power up that makes other technologies much more attractive.We don't know how protractive this will be. There are a whole bunch of caveats there. Of course.Chris Adams: is basically one of the thesis put forward by the report from the RMI it's. From deep crisis, profound change by the accidently named Kings mill bond. And AIE Levins along with Alex Tako, Jules Khost and Sam Butler, SL it's a surprisingly short, but interesting read in this, in this discussion, but I'm not sure.Henry, I'm glad you're on the call. Cause it might be worth actually asking to what extent does this end up affecting things like margin intensity? Because this is one thing that I haven't been able to understand quite so much. Cuz what I have seen recently in our world is I've read a, a blog post recently about from electricity map, talking about the choice of module versus average and the fact that there's a whole ongoing bunfight about that stuff here.Henry Richardson: The price elevations can do a lot of weird thingsto the dispatch order. So for example, natural. Might have been roughly the same cost as coal. So they might have been intermixed in the dispatch stack the order in which they're dispatched a significant rise in price may make coal cheaper than natural gas, so that you'll run coal before you run natural gas.So it could affect the total emissions changes, or even if coal's lower in the stack, low cost periods could be dirtier than high cost wholesale periods because you're bringing on. Coal will respond to low cost changes, and then you bring on peaking natural gas. And if you increase demand, then they'll just burn more natural gas and not more coal.So some weird dynamics like that, you can all see, see inversions. So the price effects are very, can be kind of dynamic and update in real time.Sara Bergman: I think this is super interesting and I'm just using this to like, learn more, but coming from a, or currently living in a nation that sort of made our wealth from oil and gas, uh, because way for, and we have vast amount of resources that the government luckily decided to not. Dig to because they are destroying coastal areas, cetera, but what's to stop countries from just, oh, gas is lucrative.Let's just bring up more.Chris Adams: So it might be useful for context, for people who knew were new to this. Cuz we have a few kind of energy walks on this. There's a helpful blog post on the green software foundation website called understanding energy trends at the layer below the tech stack, where we talk a little bit about this. And if you are, you've never heard of what a dispatch stack is or any of this is there's a little bit there which might elucidate and provide a bit more background on this. So we can, if, if, if you're totally new to this.Asim Hussain: Because this whole world is so complicated. We've got on one side there's right. There's rising energy prices. And on one level that is going to help accelerate the transition towards renewables because then, well, if you, if you. If you've got a renewables, your crane, electric renewables, you just can make more money from selling your renew energy.But on the other hand, they're just, you're gotta make a hell of a lot more money by drilling oil and gas. So what I'm trying to get in my head is, is it better? You are saying the RMI saying they've done the maths. And they said, actually raising rising prices is better, period. Or are they saying that rising prices will just help the transition?Chris Adams: Okay. So here's one of the issues is that over the last, say 10 years in Henry, you can probably back me up on this in a bit more detail. And what you have seen in America in particular is you've seen this kind of glut of kind of cheap gas coming onto the market. Right. But a lot of that has happened.That a loss. So you had all these people who are like drilling, drilling, drilling, drilling, drilling, but they weren't necessarily turning a profit. They were just like going for like a little bit, like how, at our level, we incentivized to go for growth and worry about revenue or profit later. You've had the same thing happen for a long time.But in the last few years you've seen in particularly the last like year and a half, I suppose you've seen a, you've basically seen all the people who actually do have been doing this. They said, oh, we need to kind of make a return to our investors. So rather than actually. Bringing more gas on stream, for example, to bring down the cost.Every single large provider has basically said, no, we're not gonna do anything about supply. We're just gonna make sure we are gonna give a return to our shareholders. We're gonna exercise kind of shareholder. Discipline is the term that people have been using a lot. And this basically is why we have loads and loads of why you have such high prices right now.So yes, you've had demand in lots of places go up that you haven't seen the corresponding increase in supply, even though there's lots. People there's lots of basically operators who have been able to do this and do have permits for drilling. They've said, well, we're gonna keep the price high and actually make sure that we can get return to our shoulders rather than increase the, uh, supply and therefore the cost, which would probably be good for like people who want to.Buy cheap electricity or cheap, cheap fuel. Probably not so good for the climate, but definitely not so good for shareholders. Who've been quite annoyed about them not being able to make a return over the last say, say five to 10 years while there's been this mania to just expand, expand, expand, and drill, drill, drill.But Henry, I'm happy to defer to you because you are in Houston and I'm not, and I'm in Berlin.Henry Richardson: This is not something that I have a ton of expertise in, but if you think about you are seeing price increases across the board in, in like your natural gas delivered to your house for consumption, electricity costs, fuel costs. So like all prices are rising. So it's. Pressure on all forces. So for an electricity transition, going from natural gas, heating to electricity, heating there's, the forces are kind of equaling out.That's like neither one is any more attractive than it was before, but we're seeing renewables as an enormously valuable hedge against the cost of power increases. So the fuel costs for renewables have not increased the fuel costs for everything else have. So there's still a huge benefit. To, to power systems that have already decarbonized to some degree.Chris Adams: Also come from fuel and you don't have to pay for fuel with renewables. Then you kind of got quite a pretty good advantage, right? Like this is the, this is the key thing. And as long as you have a way to address the intermittency issues or the variability, and there are ways around that, then you can do something to basically do better financially than, than you otherwise would be.Henry Richardson: a really interesting point about the intermittency and it's something, I guess the green software foundation actually talks about pretty frequently. Awesome. You coined the like carbon. Air, which means both time shifting and location shifting. And while we, we don't really talk about it very often. So we talking about software itself and like where it runs and when it runs.But the things that software controls like heat pump, hot water heaters, EVs. Smart thermostats. And you have to build really sophisticated algorithms to take advantage of this. So it's still very much so software, those will be key in managing intermittency down the road. So if we have a ton of EVs, that's an enormous amount of storage that can be scheduled and managed.If you think of a heat pump, hot water heater tank as kind of a thermal battery, if you either oversize that tank. Or include a mixing valve and overheat that tank. You can actually consider it a, a thermal storage. And I think those are two of the largest energy consumers in a household that have flexibility, but even generally two of the largest.Sara Bergman: cuz I think that's a key difference from like when we think of data centers or software. Where that software requires. We need like electricity. That's what we need. But if you take the homeowner homeowner perspective, you don't like electricity, you need, but you also need heating, especially in, in cold places.And if you're in more places, you need cooling. So you need not only electricity, but other things and, and oil and gas have this benefit, right. That you can use them for both. You can use electricity for heating. It's actually quite common where I live, but it. Much more expensive with these prices right now, and much less efficient use of it as well.So that duality, I think, is quite interesting.Asim Hussain: This might be a bit of a tangent. One of the, in I, in a previous podcast I used to have, I interviewed, I do. I'm gonna put in the show notes. I can't remember her name, but she was talking interview someone about the use of hydrogen as a replacement. For, for, for natural gas, for heating and actually most countries around the world, that's actually not possible.The UK just happened to be one of the countries where it is possible because we have like essentially a grid for natural gas. Whereas a lot of other countries don't have a grid for natural, for natural gas. And apparently it just requires, you know, a 10 minute adjustment to a, a, a boiler to get it, to burn hydrogen instead of sort of natural.I remember the other fun, fun fact. She told me, which was that hydrogen burns colorless. So they actually have to add color to it so that it, so, and I was like, well, you can have, we can have whatever color you want. You can have pink flames on your, on your gas, boiling your boiling, your kettle instead of, instead of blue ones.So I think the question I'm asking myself in my head is, is, are rising prices for. energy. Is it better? And that's kind of like, I think one of the, the questions that's coming in, is it really better? And one of the,Chris Adams: Is it better?Asim Hussain: yeah, well, that's the thing. Is it better for what, what is it better for? I mean, it's obviously it's really, really hard for a lot of people in the world.I mean, right now, I mean, right now in the UK, it's quite good. It's summer, you know, we're not gonna be hit with big heating bills when it comes to winter, it's gonna be really, really challenging. But the same level when the price of something is high, it means you're focused on efficiency. Is much, much more important things like intermittency is much, much more important.If electricity was 10 times more expensive than what it is right now, how would that change our landscape and the conversations that we're having with people? How would data centers work? What would be the, the focus on green software is the problem that we have right now that electricity is too cheap and we're just wasting.Chris Adams: This is my free idea and the thing I wish I had time to add a pool request for cloud carbon footprint, right? Cost of energy is absolutely a thing for like equity and people having access to like, you know, warmth and heat and, and cool. If you want, when you're in someone like say Texas, cause I suspect Henry you probably care about being cold rather than too hot right now.Yeah. Like if, you know, if we might be okay in a, in a relatively separate place, but. It's like 54 degrees in some parts of the world right now, like Iran, for example. Right? So the dream feature for something like cloud carbon footprint or any of these tools would be allowing organizations to price this at the level of their organization really would price it.So right now, if you were able to do something like, well, we value the cost of carbon emissions. That may be a hundred tons. And then you factor that into the price. When you saw a dashboard, this is how you can end up having the same ways to track this and measure this stuff within, inside a team. Because if you're gonna have like any kind of tools for track for in the same way that you might track say compute bills on a weekly basis to see, have you seen in a weird spikes, if you have some way to say, show me the full, the actual true cost that's who that's.Push that, that that's, that's actually transferred to everyone else outside of the binder of, of our organization. I think there are ways that you can do this because every other organization or every other sector, or most other sectors are currently experimenting with things like internal carbon pricing shipping does this now aviation there's stuff around this and various organizations like say, well, Microsoft does it, you know, 15, 15 bucks per ton, a hundred bucks for trans for, for aviation, but like groups, like say Lloyds of London.They have figures of like 250 pounds per ton for this stuff. And when you look at it like this, when you realize that it's actually the CO2 emissions, rather than the energy, that's the thing that we are really trying to reduce in the context of climate change. It makes sense to price it accordingly. So you have the right signals inside teams who are able to act upon it.Really. I feel like that's a better way to think about this and like there's loads of precedence of us pricing, other things we value. So why would, why wouldn't we do it with carbon and, and expose it to our own metrics inside our teams to act.Sara Bergman: Yeah, that really strikes a chord with me. I think. Actionability on. This is key, cuz when you are in a software team, whatever role you have, if you can't measure it, if you can't track it, if no one knows about it, it's incredibly hard to put it on the agenda to say that, yes, we should care the most about this.And people are like, okay, great. How will we know we're doing better? And you say it's a gut feeling. It's not gonna fly with stakeholders. It's not gonna fly with management. It's not gonna maybe fly with the rest of your teammates either. So having this actionability, and we've spoken a lot about the, the energy grid now, and it's like super fascinated for people like us who are deeply interested in it.Not everyone needs to be this deeply interested in it to act on climate, right? You don't need it if you want to. Great, but we wanna make it simpler and more actionable for people with like hands on desks in code rather than. Just the geeks, I guess I'm proudly a geek. So I'm saying that with all, all my love.Henry Richardson: And I think we're seeing a lot of efforts towards that at the green software foundation, especially the SDK will hopefully make it much more accessible. So you. Have to think about the, the carbon intensity of the grid. You don't have to think about like, what tools do I need or the carbon intensity of different things.It'll just kind of be built into a, an accessible tool. Awesome. Do you have an update on that? You were about to mention something.Asim Hussain: You just said the SDK, I just gave the full name carbon or SDK. And I do know the team is, is working on an release in July. So we was keep an eye out for that. Cause I remember there was a report or a paper out a couple of years ago about, was it called the social cost of carbon? Cause you mentioned $15 for Microsoft.It used to be seven. They just doubled it one day. Because you can, because it's so arbitrary, you can just double it and whatever, but like the social cost of carbon was that calculation, which is you actually put a dollar term on it. What is the impact on the environment, but also what the impact on my children and, and, and down the line, I think it was like $300 a ton.If I remember rightly it was around that, that, that priceChris Adams: So it's changed depending on who's been in power. All right. So with the Barack Obama administration, it was $50 a ton under Drumpf. It went down to $1 per to.Asim Hussain: Oh,Chris Adams: It's now gone higher up. I forget. I think it's actually close to 50, again, we're under the Biden administration, but what you might be thinking about assume is the UK.I know in the UK they have a figure. They don't actually have, they, they use something called a carbon value, which is another price for this. And their figure is one that climbs over time. And basically they use it as a kind of way of checking the impact of the policies. So in 2022, the cost that they use is.Yeah, they have a, they have ranged from 124 to 373 pounds, which is about what 500 bucks, 500 us dollars roundabout per ton, but that ratchets up. So every year it climbs up to the point where in 2050, you're looking at a hundred between 189 and 560 odd pound, which is close to eight or 900 us dollars. I think.I mean, I'll let someone else kind of cut. Help me with the actual specifics, but yeah, they use that to basically make decisions about policy. So they don't charge people the way that say Microsoft does. So it's not like a heavy price in that sense, but is definitely used for framings. And this is actually some work that we're doing.And we shared inside the group, the GSF slack about ways to think about carbon pricing. There's there's like high, you can think in terms of the height, like how, how high is the number? How broad is it as in. How much of your organization organizations operations, does it, does it impact? So a broad one might be 15 across the board, whereas a narrow one might be, say a hundred dollars, but only for aviation, like the Microsoft example.And then you might think in terms of like weight, which is, does this. Impact me and my team or my organization right now, like with Microsoft, where the money is taken out of someone's budget and put into like this kind of carbon war chest for savings compared to a kind of shadow price that you might see, let's say shell uses or other oil companies where basically say we are gonna use this to factor in an investment decision, or maybe with the UK government where they use it as saying.They're not taking money out of any purses, but they're using it to decide whether they should or should not go ahead with a particular policy decision because they've decided, and they're using this number to basically account for all the kind of other impacts that basically carbon mission can have because they have long reaching impacts in terms of health and well, the economy and everything like that.Asim Hussain: can you buy anything in this world? When can you buy a ton of anything in this. for a couple of hundred dollars. That's why I'm just a tons, a large amount of something. So is that price? That price just, just feels too low. I mean, I, I can't, it doesn't feel right. I mean, does it really give you the incentivization to make those kinds of changes?I'm not too sure.Henry Richardson: This, this might go back to Sarah's point around like there's a, there's a, there's a significant difference between not considering carbon at all. And thinking about carbon in the optimization, that is a much larger leap than deciding what price to put on carbon, because it becomes a decision making factor versus one, not at all.And I think that is a while we're talking about like, should it be 300? Should it be 50? I think the idea of just including carbon at all is a much more radical concept than, than picking the correct cost or the correct impact.Asim Hussain: It's called a Maserati problem. I think it's what you usually called the Maserati problem. It's the startup space. I think it a long time ago in the startup space, like it's like a Maserati problem is, is a, is a problem you'll only have once you're driving Maseratis, cuz your startups made so much money.there's not really much point worrying about it right now, but yeah. Hear your point. Yeah. So it's yeah. Hmm.Sara Bergman: And that that's the flip side of it, right? Because if you are a small organization, then this number might matter a lot. If you're really, if you're a government, like this number becomes arbitrary very quickly, even when you price it super high, it's. Dropping the ocean compared to, to other things. And you maybe don't want it to be in direct competition with other things like basic healthcare, et cetera.Chris Adams: Is basically I'm, I'm mindful that we getting way away from green software with this kind of tangent, but this is the idea, the reason the purpose of the carbon value, one of the UK is designed to kind of capture some of this stuff. There's a guy called, uh, John Cooey who talks about this. And he basically says the.Absent other things, pricing stuff is one way to show what you're valuing things. And that doesn't mean that you wanna have this as your only kind of somewhat reductive lever for this. But if you, I think you can make an assumption that if you price something at $1, a ton versus $50 a ton, there is like a, an implicit value judgment there about, we think that the impacts don't really matter.Versus we do think that the impacts actually matter here. So I think it's, it's, it's. I mean absent any other tools. This is one thing that may be more useful, and this is kind of what, Hey, I've seen people repeatedly use as a way as a mechanism to essentially help inform a decision. Cause if you're in, if, if you are in an environment where this is one of the only levers you actually have, and if you're say inside a organization, which is primarily driven around numbers, sometimes you'll need to speak a somewhat reductive language, even though it doesn't encompass the full gamut of human experience, just because.Like we kind of do incentivize publicly traded companies, like legally fiduciary responsibility wise to act a little bit like sociopaths. So we need to like hack that and do something about that. And like, this feels like maybe one way that you do need to resort to, but probably not the only one it's also useful to maybe talk about values because well, I know, I respond to values more than most people, and there's lots of research, which says lead with values, but follow up with numbers.If you're gonna try and get any of these changes to actually be implemented or to see any change within an organization.Sara Bergman: And I think that's interesting if we think about the, like a global market where we actually price carbon really high and what that means for software, because we know data centers are big, big consumers of energy, which produces a. Of carbon. So if that means we're gonna see a rush of veiled and expansion in countries with hatch, a more renewable energy reducement yeah.Like for example, what does that mean to the local grid here? Because typically they are kind of scaled for the usage that you have now. Cause the grid always needs to be balanced. How fast will that shift go and will the grids keep up or will there be a need to import other electricity? And how will that affect the price of both building new data centers, but also the people who live in that region.And I think it's one, it can be a really good thing, right? Cause it syntheses the increased use of, uh, renew low carbon energy sources. But if this happens too fast, it can have the opposite effect for those specific regions.Henry Richardson: Sure. We definitely see that where like a large increase in demand is tends to be backfilled with fossil because that's what's available and it is dispatchable. And then only over time do renewables start to get built to fill that gap. So I think that's a key point is that's that kind of gets back to the marginal question of when you make a change, what.What fills that change and it tends to be fossil, unless there's already an oversupply of like, for example, in California, there's a huge oversupply of solar most of the year in the middle of the day. But the rest of the time you add demand and it'll be met with a fossil resource. I don't know exactly what the answer for Norway is.You might know though.Sara Bergman: We have only hydro basically, because we are a very mountainous, rainy country. So hydro is perfect. But with the cold winters that we had that would likely continue to have with climate change. A lot of that water is frozen and it's hard to make use of it. Also, it rains less or snows less in the late fall, which means there is less water.So we're seeing more and more like local incentive wise people adding solar to the roofs, et cetera, because energy prices are going up and, and with climate change, actually, they may continue to do so, even though the energy source itself is renew.Henry Richardson: And I think Norway exports a lot of its power to, I don't know if you call it mainland Europe, but so the more power that is consumed in Norway means there is less hydro to export to the rest of Europe. And that means that power that is not exported to Germany, for example, will now be fed by coal. So there's like, there are.Global implications of local energy consumption or data center development. So understanding how those dynamics can be super difficult and.Asim Hussain: That conversation's quite interesting. Cause that's making me think, well, the transition has to happen slow. Are we saying the transition has, has to happen slowly?Chris Adams: No, it doesn't, it's not that it has has to happen slowly, but in the short term, if you don't have something to fill it in, then you may end up with something filling in that gap as Henry suggests, simply because even if you have loads of batteries and things ready right there, it's gonna take a bit of time to get planning, permission, getting all their stuff, getting them actually deployed into space until you have that people might be resorting to something else in the meantime.And that means what one thing you need to have now is. Ways to either streamline that or make it ideally streamline that in a way, which does support some of the issues around equity so that you don't end up having a backlash against this or against people looking to do things. So, so for example, in Europe, right now, we have seen.Like this new plan repower EU, where there's basically a plan in the next two and a half years to deliver three Germany's worth of solar in two and a half years. Now, even if we could make all that, that's like incredible amount of solar, but it's nowhere near as ambitious as China is doing. China's going way, way, way faster than this.Right. But the thing that, that. Yes. Like there's a whole thing about some money being set aside for that. I think it's in the region of 300 billion euros has been kind of earmarked for this, but the thing that's probably gonna have, the bigger, biggest impact is changing of the laws. So it becomes faster and easy to get this stuff deployed.Cuz a lot of the time you have this backlog of things of projects being able to get set up, usually because it takes a, a good few years and if you've set yourself two and a half years, then you'll need to do something to make those changes. The worry is if you don't, if you just kind of make it easy to steam, roll this stuff through, then you'll end it with a backlash a little bit later on, which will make it hard to get the rest of the way.So this is one of the, I guess, challenges that we currently have at the moment, but. There are kind of ways around this. You can, you know, share the rewards with people in a more equitable fashion. And when you have seen that happen, then people are more prepared to deal with to, to accept say wind turbines and solar farms and stuff like that.If they get to, if, if the, if the relationship isn't quite so extractive with the existing local communities, for example,Sara Bergman: I, I think it's interesting here as well. Uh, Europe has kind of a complicated history with nuclear, but nuclear is a low carbon, uh, renewable energy source and, and that's also something. I think if I get to predict something, it will be a, a mitigation approach until we have that renewable capacity that we need, because we already have the power plants.And I know Chris, you can probably speak more about this, but I know in Germany that there's been talks for a long time to shut down all the nuclear plant power plants, but, but the current energy crisis, those are not really going forward as planned anymore because you can't spare that energy that they can produce, which I think is interesting.Cuz a lot of time we conflate. Environment and climate, they are not necessarily the same thing, at least in, in my language that I speak there, they don't mean the same thing because nuclear is not great for your local environment, cuz you need a final storage, but for climate, they are great. It's very low carbon.Chris Adams: So there's some stuff I can share for this specifically in the German context. So we've had this whole energy vendor for a very long time and you are absolutely, you can absolutely make the argument that yes, having very useful, very, very low carbon or, you know, Basically carbon free energy available for a very long time is a really good idea.The thing that it's worth bearing in mind is that in Germany specifically, it's not necessarily the energy, that's the issue. It's the heating, that's the issue, which is why you've seen there's such dependency on like fossil gas and stuff like that for heating. So heating is the problem more than electricity right now, or has been for most recently?So it's not just as easy just saying, well, if only they'd switched on the new, it kept the nukes on it. It'd be fine. I. They absolutely are really, really helpful for that, but that's, it's not as simple as just saying, oh, if we had that, then that would, that would've solved all the problems. They still wouldn't really have solved some of the heat issues that we do have because Germany can be a cold temp, cold country at times.Asim Hussain: The advice and the plan for the whole world is to electrify. So I think, you know, I hear your point, you know, and same in the UK, like I've actually got gas heating at home. It would cost me an insane amount of money to heat my house to electricity right now. But I kind of stayed away from it for a while, but I finally read the book from Michael Shellenberger - The Apocalypse Never. Yeah. As Chris, Chris. Yeah. As the eye rolls, I've been going through like a process recently of, of kind of reading stuff that people told me never to read, but he, he made a really solid argument for nuclear. I find it very, very hard to kind of question a lot of that. Because, you know, the amount of energy that we need in the world is, is phenomenal.And, and especially the new, the new nuclear power plants, the new, the new stuff's being designed and deployed are, are, you know, it's not the same as the old ones. And just to kind of answer a point that was made that I, I, it really resonated in my mind with nuclear, was that the, the, all the nuclear waste from the entirety of the United States from history to.Could could fill an Olympic size swimming pool and it's easy to manage and you just keep it there. Whereas coal and gas, it's just all goes in the atmosphere. So there there's this waste, there's this, this concept of waste and nuclear, and you really hate it. But then, and it's horrible waste, but at least it's self-contained whereas this other stuff is all out there.So that was an argument I thought was really, really compelling.Henry Richardson: I think everyone has their pet technologies and they're like, we need to build nuclear. We need to build geothermal. And like,Chris Adams: Yeah,Henry Richardson: yes, we need all of it. Like, we're gonna need nuclear. We're gonna need hydro. We're gonna need geothermal. Like we just have an energy shortage or a non fossil energy shortage.Is that a better way of phrasing that?Asim Hussain: non-fossil energy yeah.Henry Richardson: deficit gap? However you wanna describe that. So I think. I, if, if nuclear is successful affordable, it would probably one of the solutions.Chris Adams: If it arrives in time. That's the thing, assuming it arrives in time. Cause the first predicted thing to go on at a common stream in America, 2030, right? So that's, this is one of the issues, so much needs to happen this decade, that when we only talk about this thing, which at earliest could happen there, this basically we can fall into a discussion about, oh, it's just delay.Let's just wait. Let's let's not make too many changes or be too fast. Like we really don't have that time right now. Like we're really, really late in the day, but we can also not forget the first fuel efficiency.Asim Hussain: true. And, and by 23, we'll have cold fusion reactors. So don't worry about. I’m joking. That's a joke.Should we do a wrap up?Chris Adams: Okay. So what we've covered in this discussion is dived into all the trends happening at one there below. Most of us tend to work in the stack and there are all kinds of geopolitical implications of what we have of what what's going on. And they do affect not only people who are. Dealing with it day to day, but these also ripple out across the rest of the world.And as a responsible software engineer, knowing about this makes it easier for you to prepare for turbulent times ahead.Henry Richardson: Another way, phrase it, the war is happening and it's having wild effects on energy prices. And we're like, there's some, there's some thought out there that these increased prices could accelerate decarbonization of different sectors. Which might help mitigate climate change effects - full stop.Asim Hussain: That works.Sara Bergman: That was good!Asim Hussain: That was good.Hey everyone. Thanks for listening. Just a reminder to follow Environment Variables on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please do leave a rating and review. If you like what we're doing, it helps other people discover the show. And of course we want more listeners to find out more about the Green Software Foundation. Please visit greensoftware.foundation . Thanks again, and see you in the next show.

This week Chris Adams takes over the reins from Asim Hussain to discuss how does artificial intelligence and machine learning impact climate change. He is joined by Will Buchanan of Azure ML (Microsoft), Abhishek Gupta; the chair of the Standards Working Group for the Green Software Foundation and Lynn Kaack; assistant professor at the Hertie School in Berlin. They discuss boundaries, Jevon’s paradox, the EU AI Act, inferencing and supply us with a plethora of materials regarding ML and AI and the climate!Learn more about our guests:Chris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / WebsiteWill Buchanan: LinkedInAbhishek Gupta: LinkedInLynn Kaack: LinkedIn / Latest PaperEpisode resources:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter Green Software Foundation SummitProject: PachamaProject: This Climate Does Not ExistLegislation: The EU AI ActPaper: The Green AI MovementGitHub: Dynamic Batch Inferencing - Taylor Prewitt & Ji Hoon Kang of UWGitHub: NVIDIA Triton server on AzureML & Model AnalyzerIf you enjoyed this episode then please either:Follow, rate, and review on Apple PodcastsFollow and rate on SpotifyConnect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!Transcript Below:Abhishek Gupta: We're not just doing all of this accounting to produce reports and to, you know, spill ink, but it's to concretely drive change in behavior. And this was coming from folks who are a part of the standards working group, including will and myself who are practitioners who are itching to get something that helps this change.Our behavior change our team's behaviors when it comes to building greener software.Asim Hussain: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discuss the latest news and events surrounding green software. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software.I'm your host. Assim Hussain.Chris Adams: Hello there and welcome to the Environment Variables podcast. The podcast about green software. I'm Chris Adams filling in for Asim Hussain, the regular host while he's on paternity leave, with a brand new baby! I met Asim on climateaction.tech, an online community for climate aware, techies. And I work for the green web foundation where we work towards a fossil free internet by 2030, as well as working as the co-chair for the green software foundations policy group.Today, we're talking about climate change, AI and green software, and I'm joined by Lynn, Will and Abhishek.Will Buchanan: Thanks for having me. My name is will. I'm a product manager on the Azure machine learning team. I'm also a member of the green software foundation standards and innovation working group within Microsoft. I foster the green AI community, which now has a few hundred members and I'm also a climate activist.That's focused on pragmatic solutions to complex environmental issues. Recently I shipped energy consumption metrics within Azure machine learning, and we are about to publish a paper titled measuring carbon intensity of AI in cloud instances, which I think we'll touch on today.Abhishek Gupta: Well, thanks for having me. I'm Abhishek Gupta, I'm the founder and principal researcher at the Montreal ethics Institute. I also work as a senior responsible AI leader and expert at the Boston consulting group, BCG and I serve as the chair for the standards working group at the Green Software Foundation. So I've got a few hats on there.Most of my work. As it relates to what we're gonna talk about. Runs at the intersection of responsible AI and green software in particular what's offer interest to me is looking at how the intersections of social responsibility, the environmental impacts of software systems in particular AI systems.Can be thought about when we're looking to make a positive impact on the world while using technology in a responsible fashion. I also, as a part of the green software foundation, help through the standards working group, come up with the software carbon intensity specification, where we are trying to create an actionable way for developers and consumers or software systems to better assess and, and mitigate the environmental impacts of their work.Chris Adams: Okay. And Lynn last but not least joining us from Berlin. Thank you very much for joining us.Lynn Kaack: Yeah, thank you so much. I am an assistant professor at a policy school, public policy school called Hertie School in Berlin. And I am also a co-founder and a chair of an organization called climate change. AI. And with climate change AI, we facilitate work at the intersection of machine learning and different kinds of climate domains, focusing on climate change, mitigation and adaptation.And in my work, in my research, I am looking at how we can use machine learning as a tool to address different problems related to energy and climate policy. And I'm also interested in the policy of AI and climate. And today, actually, since we're talking about papers, I have a paper coming up that is called aligning artificial intelligence with climate change mitigation, where we look at the different impacts from machine learning and how they affect greenhouse gas emissions.Chris Adams: Awesome. So we actually have some decent deep domain expertise and I'll try to keep this quite. But we might drop into a little bit of like data science nerd around here, but the podcast has done that previously and it turns out to be something that we've got some decent feedback from because there aren't that many podcasts covering.Okay. So let's, uh, get into this topic of green AI and climate change. As we know, it is a significant driver of emissions in its own, right? When we think about other climate crisis this year, the IPCC, which is the intergovernmental panel on climate change in their big reports, which synthesized literally thousands of papers explicitly called out digital as a thing we, we should be talking about and thinking about, and if you're a responsible technologist, it seems like a thing that we should be taking into account here.Now I found it helpful to think about it, uh, a little bit like how we think about the shipping industry, partly because there is similar in terms of emissions, which is around between one and 3%, depending what you look at it. But also in that both of these acts like kind of connective tissue for society.We also think of it as a kind of force multiplier for the existing forms of activity. So if you use it, which is in line with the recommendations of the science, that's a good thing. But if you use. To do something which is kind of rejecting some of the sites. It might not be such a good thing. And within technology, AI and machine learning particular is one of the fastest growing sectors and often seen as one of the biggest levers of all.So we're gonna highlight some interesting projects we'll start off with, and outta that, we'll probably dive into some specifics about that or some of the things you might wanna take into account. If you're a technologist wanting to. Incorporate an awareness of climate into how you work and build greener software.Then finally we'll hopefully leave you with some actionable tips and techniques or projects that you may contribute to or use in your daily practice. There's another term that we might be touching on here when you're making AI greener and that's specifically green AI. Is that the case? Well,Will Buchanan: Correct. And that actually was coined by, uh, researchers a few years ago. Uh, Roy Schwartz, Jesse Dodge, uh, and it's really focused on making the development of the AI system itself more sustainable and it's to be dis Abid for. On the term using AI for sustainability.Chris Adams: Okay. So that's something we'll touch on both today. We'll talk about some of the external impacts and some of the internal impacts. We're gonna start with something quite easy first, because, well, why not? I'm just gonna ask each of the people here to. Kind of point to maybe one project that they've seen, that's using ML in quite an interesting fashion to ideally come up with some kind of measurable win.Well, if there was one project you'd actually look to that you think is kind of embodying these ideas of like green AI, AI or something, which is really helping us essentially face some of the challenges. Maybe you could tell us about what's catching your right at the moment. What you'd look.Will Buchanan: been thinking a lot about natural capital recently. And I learned about a startup called Pachama, which combines remote sensing data with machine learning to help measure. Monitor the carbon stored in a forest. I think it's really, really valuable because they're providing verification and insurance of carbon credits at scale.And they've protected about a million hectares of forest. I think that's really when you have IT and remote sensing and machine learning combining to help nature restore itself.Chris Adams: Okay. Cool. So if I understand that they're using satellites to basically track forests and sit and track deforestation, is that the idea that they're doing?Will Buchanan: Yes. And also to verify the amount of carbon that a forest can sequester.Chris Adams: Okay. Cool. All right. I know there's a few other projects related to this. If I just hand over to Abhishek, can you let us know. What's caught your eyes recently and then we'll see what other projects come out of this.Abhishek Gupta: absolutely. I think one of the projects, and I don't know. I mean, if it, what the. Impact has been so far. In fact, it's. It's something that's come out of MILA, which is, or, you know, called the Montreal Institute for learning algorithms, which is Dr. Benji's lab in, in Montreal. In fact, one of the people who led that project as a part of climate change, AI as well, who I'm sure Lynn can talk more about too, which is SASA.And she's done this project called this climate does not exist, which I think was a fascinating use of machine learning to visualize the impact climate change will have on. You know, places around you in, in a very arresting and, and visually capturing fashion, which I think when we think about what impact climate change is going to have around us, sometimes it, it feels quite distant because it's a, it's a slow rolling thing that's coming our way.And this. Puts it in, in, in a way that's quite immediate, quite visually arresting. And I think stores people to action. I, as I said, I'm, I'm not sure what the measurable impact of that has been yet, but I, I certainly feel that those are the kinds of creative users of AI. When we want to galvanize people into action around climate change.Lynn Kaack: happy to also talk about an application, which is also kind of difficult in terms of measuring impact, but I think it's. Another interesting component of what AI can do. And this is something that at the Austin Institute of Technology do on a project called Infrared and they use machine learning to help design new districts and cities.And especially at the moment in many countries, a lot of. New urban districts are being built and how we build these has a huge impact on energy consumption in cities, both in terms of transportation, but also how buildings are heated or cooled. And by the use of machine learning, they can drastically improve design choices because now they can approximate their very computationally heavy models and run them much faster, which means that they can also have more runs and can try out more design configurations.So this is. Rather indirect application, but it has huge implications also on emissions for, for many decades to.Chris Adams: Using kind of housing policy as climate policy there, because there's just a huge amount of emissions built into how people live and whether they need to drive everywhere in a car and stuff like that. That's, that's some of the stuff that it's doing and making that part.Lynn Kaack: So it's not really looking at housing policy, but it's looking at how districts are designed. So they take. The group of, of houses, like if the, a new district is to be built and then they simulate the wind flow going through these cities, which are very expensive simulation models. And then they take the outputs of their model and approximate it with the machine learning model, which makes it much, much faster.So from hours or days, you go to milliseconds or below seconds for one run, and then you can try out different design configurations and understand better how. The build infrastructure affects natural cooling. For example, in cities or walkability energy impacts generally of the micro climate on, on the build environment.Chris Adams: I had no idea that. It was actually possible. That's really, really cool.Will Buchanan: That's very cool. That's similar to generative design.Chris Adams: Generative design. This is the phrase I haven't heard actually will. Maybe you could elucidate or share something there actually.Will Buchanan: It's similar to some software that Autodesk has built, where you can try out many different iterations of a design and come up with optimum solutions. I think what's really cool that you're just consolidating it and running these models more efficiently.Chris Adams: Okay, cool. And that's a bit like following, say a fitness function saying I've have a chair or, you know, I wanna have something works like a chair and needs four legs and a seating pattern. And then it essentially comes up with some of the designs or iterates through some of the PO possibilities, something like that.Will Buchanan: Exactly.Chris Adams: Oh, wow. Okay. That's cool. All right then. So we've spoken about AI and there's a few exciting, interesting ones that we can add into the show notes and list from, and for people to look into and see how that might relate to what they do. I suppose I wanted to ask a little bit about measuring impact from these projects because.There's quite a few different ways that you can actually measure impact here. And in many times it can be quite a difficult thing to kind of pin down. And this is continually thing that's come up. When I know that people have tried to come up with specs like the software carbon intensity, and I'm Sureek, you've had some experiences here will, you've mentioned a little bit about.Actually measuring impact internally. And it sounds like you've just had to do a bunch of this work on the ML team right now and exposes some of these numbers to people consuming these services in the first place. Could you talk about some of that part a bit, perhaps?Will Buchanan: Certainly. And so, as I mentioned, we have shipped energy consumption metrics for both training and inference within Azure machine learning. And that's really complex when you think of the infrastructure required to just report that. That doesn't necessarily account for the additional power that's consumed in the data center, such as the idle power for devices or for the utilization of your servers.So there's so many different factors there. So you really, you could encounter scope creep when you come to your measurement methodology. So it's really necessary to put boundaries around that.Chris Adams: Okay. And when you use the term boundaries here, you are saying I'm gonna measure the environmental impact of the servers, but not the environment impact of building the building to put the servers in. Is that the idea of when you're referring to a boundary?Will Buchanan: Yes, that's great.Chris Adams: Okay. Alright. I think this is actually something we've come across quite a few times in other places as well, actually, because maybe it's worth asking about this kind of boundary issue that we have had here, because automatically that sounds complicated here.And I know that Abhishek you've had some issues at your end as well with defining this staff for deciding, deciding what's in or out, because I think this is one thing that we've had to explicitly do for the software carbon intensity spec. Right?Abhishek Gupta: Exactly. And, and I think when we talk about boundaries, it's, it's, it's trying to get a sense for what are the actual pieces that are consumed, right? From an operational standpoint, from an embodied ion standpoint and how you make those, you know, allocations across. You know, what, what your system is consuming.And I use the word system because I think again, when we talk about software, we're not just talking about a specific piece, but we're talking about really everything that it touches be that, you know, network be that bandwidth consumption, be that, you know, as, as will was saying idle power, even when we are looking at cloud computing, it becomes even more complicated when you.Your pieces of software that are sharing tendency across the pieces of hardware and how different consumers are perhaps sharing that piece of hardware with you and, and thinking about whether you've booked the resource ahead of time or not, whether it's hot or cold in terms of its availability and what implications that has.I mean, there are so many different facets to it. And each of those decisions, what I wanna highlight here is. That it comes with a trade off, right? So we also don't have any standards in terms of how we should go about measuring that and what should be included, what should be included. And so the way people report out these numbers today also doesn't really make it actionable for folks who are consuming or who want to consume these reports, these metrics in, in taking decisions as to, you know, whether something is green or not.And I think that's one of the places that the software carbon intensity specification is trying to help folks. Is to help standardize it first and foremost, but also to make it actionable so that if you are someone who's environmentally conscious, you can make the right choice by being informed about what the actual impacts are.Chris Adams: This is a question that I'm curious about here. Cause so far we've only been speaking internally about, okay, what is the environmental impact of it itself? Like its direct emissions, but the assumption that I have here is that there are ways we might talk. About the impact that it has on the outside world, in terms of what activity we're speeding up or accelerating or supporting there, is that the only issue that we need to think about?Or are there any other things to take into account about like this system boundary part that we've just been talking about?Lynn Kaack: Yeah. So these system effects are really important to look at and to consider, maybe just to give an example, like if you use machine learning in, let's say the oil and gas sector to make. Small parts of the operations, more energy efficient that, and the first site looks like something that could be considered sustainable and green, but you also have to realize that often then you are reducing costs as well.And that might change the way that oil and gas in this particular example is competitive for the particular company is competitive. And that actually might shift also how much oil and gas we are able to use in the short run, how the prices change. So. Indirect effects can actually then have much larger impacts than the immediate effects of such an application.So drawing boundaries is really important and also opening this up to, to have the broader system level view, and really try to understand how does the technology also change then than to larger consumption and, and production patterns. It's important.Chris Adams: if I understand that correctly, that's talking almost like the consequences of an intervention that we might make here. So even though we might have reduced the emissions of. The drilling part by putting a wind turbine on an oil rig, for example, that might change the economics and make people more likely to use oil.In which many cases they might burn, for example, or stuff like that, is that basically what you're saying?Lynn Kaack: Yeah, essentially what I'm saying is that efficiency improvements in particular, and often they can be done with data science or with machine learning or AI systems. They often come with cost reductions and then those cost reductions do something and change something. And often this is also considered under rebound effects, but it's not only rebound effects.So it's systemic. The system level impacts that come from more small scale applications that need to be considered.Will Buchanan: That's such a good point. And I think I've also heard it called J's paradox.Chris Adams: Yes, J's paradox. This is stuff from like the 1800s with steam engines, right? Like my understanding of the J's paradox was back when people had steam engines and they made steam. More efficient. This led to people basically burning more coal because it suddenly became more accessible to more people.And you ended up using an integrated number of factories. So there's a kind of rebound, I think that we need to take into account. This is something I think has been quite difficult to actually capture with existing ways of tracking the environmental impact of particular projects. We have like an idea of say an attribution based approach and a consequence based approach.And maybe it's worth actually talking about here about how. Some of the complexities we might need to wrestle with when you're designing a system here. I mean, Abhishek, I think this was one of the things that was an early decision with the software carbon intensity part to not try to have an attribution approach versus a marginal approach.And if we're not diving too deeply into jargon here, maybe you might be able to kind of share a bit more information on that part there, because it sounds like it's worth expanding or explaining to people to the audience a bit better.Abhishek Gupta: Indeed. You know, the reason for making that choice was, again, our emphasis on being action oriented. Right? So as we had started to develop the software carbon intensity specification, One of the early debates that we had to wrestle with and, and, you know, will, and will was of course a crucial part of that as well as were the folks who were a part of the standards working group was figuring out how, for example, the G G way of going about doing that, you know, accounting doesn't really translate all that well for software systems and how perhaps adopting a, a slightly different approach would lead to more.More actionable outcomes for the folks who want to use this ultimately to change behavior because. You know, without getting into specifics of, you know, what marginal is and what consequential approaches are. And, and if we want I'm, I'm sure, you know, we would, would be happy to dive into all of those details as would I.But the thing that we were seeing was that we we're doing all of this great work around, you know, talking about scope 1, 2, 3 emissions, et cetera, but it's not really helping to drive behavior change. And that's really it. The crux of all of this, right? Is that we're not just doing all of this accounting to produce reports and to, you know, spill in, but it's to concretely drive.Change in behavior. And that's where we found that adopting a consequential adopting marginal approach actually helped make it more actionable. And this was coming from folks who are a part of the standards working group, including Will and myself who are practitioners, who, who are itching to get something that helps us change our behavior, change our team's behaviors when it comes to building greener software broadly speaking.Chris Adams: So that helps with explaining the difference between a consequential approach and a marginal approach. As in the consequences of me building this thing will mean that this is more likely to happen. And if I understand it, the GSG protocol that you mentioned, which is the greenhouse gas protocol and this scoped emissions approach, this is the kind of standard way that an organization might report.It's kind of climate responsibility as it were when, and when you say scoped emissions, that's like scope one, which is burning. Say that's emissions from fossil fuels, burned on site or in your car. For example, scope two is electricity and scope three is your supply chain. If I understand what you're saying, there's like a kind of gap there that doesn't account for.The impacts of this, perhaps. I mean, as some people who've referred to this as scope zero or scope four, which might be, what are the impacts an organization is happening to essentially that we mentioned before, do something around this systemic change. Or as Lynn mentioned, like this is changing the price of a particular commodity to make it more likely to be used or less likely to be used.And this is what I understand. The S St is actually trying to do, it's trying to address some of this consequential approach because the current approach doesn't capture all of the. Impacts an organization might actually have at the moment. Right.Will Buchanan: That's a good summary. One challenge that I have noticed is that until it's required in reporting structures, like the greenhouse gas protocol, then organizations don't have an incentive to really take. Action that they need to avoid climate disaster. It's something I encounter on a daily basis. And I think broadly, we need to bring this into the public discourse.Chris Adams: I think you're right. I think it's worth it actually, Lynn, I think that when I've seen some of the work that you've done, you've done previously, this is something that's come into. Some of the briefings that I think that you've shared previously with climate change, I eight work and some of the policy briefings for governments as well.Is there something that you might better add on here?Lynn Kaack: Yeah. So something that comes to mind is for example, like a concrete legislation that's currently being developed is the EU AI act. And that's a place where for the first time AI systems are being regulated. also that scale and climate change almost didn't play a role for that regulation in the first draft.So here it's also really evident that if we don't write in climate change now as a criterion for evaluating AI systems, it will probably be ignored for the next few years to come. So the way that legislation works is by classifying certain AI systems as high risk, and also just outright banning some other systems, but as high risk systems, Could as the original legislation stood, weren't really explicitly classified as high risk, even if they had a huge environmental or climate change impact.And that's something that I talked about a lot with policy makers and trying to encourage them to more explicitly make environmental factors in climate change effective for evaluating my. So that'd be a very concrete case where making climate change more explicit in the AI context is important also in terms of legislation.Abhishek Gupta: There's, there's a lot. Said about the EU AI act. Right. And, and, and a ton of in has been spelled everywhere. I think as, as you know, it's, it's, it's, it's called the Brussels effect for a reason, right. Where the I, whatever happens in the EU is taken as gospel and, and, and sort of. Spread across the world, which I think has already, Lynn has pointed out there.It's not, it's not perfect. Right? I think one of the things that I've seen being particularly problematic is the rigid categorization of what, you know, high risk use cases are. And, and whether the EEO AI act, as we'll see, hopefully with some, you know, revisions that are coming down the pipe is whether.We'll have the ability to add new categories and, and, and not just update subcategories within the existing, existing identified high risk categories. And I think that's where things like considerations for environmental impacts and really tying that to this. You know, societal impacts of AI, where we're talking about bias privacy and all the other areas is going to be particularly important because we need multiple levers to, to try to account for or to push on getting people, to consider the environmental impacts.And given that there is such a great momentum already in terms of privacy considerations, bias considerations, I think now is the time where we really push hard. To make environmental considerations, an equally first class citizen, when it comes to, you know, thinking about the societal impacts of AI.Will Buchanan: This is something I'm incredibly passionate about. I. It needs to encompass the full scope of harms that are caused by an AI system. So that could be the hidden environmental impacts of either the development or the application. The application could vastly outweigh the good that you're doing. Even just expanding oil and gas production by a certain percentage amount.I think it just must account for all of the harms for both the ecosystems and people.Chris Adams: thing. Does this category. Actually include this stuff right now. What counts as like a high risk use case? For example, when, when mentioned.Lynn Kaack: I haven't seen the latest iteration. I think there has been some update on, there's been a lot of feedback on the version that was published. In April last year, I haven't seen the latest iteration. I think a lot of things have changed in yeah. In the first version, there was high risk systems where, when, uh, those that affect personal safety, like human rights in a sense of, of personal wellbeing, but the completely overlooked environmental protection aspects of human rights.Chris Adams: Wow. That's quite a large one, especially when you take into account the human rights. Okay. We've spoken about the external impact, but I am led to believe there is also an internal impact from this as well. Like the AI has, has some direct impact. That we might wanna talk about as well as I understand it, we spoke about two to 3% of emissions here, but if we know there's an external impact, why would we care about any of the internal impacts of AI at all, really here, what we might be doing or why we might wanna care about the internal impacts of AI as well, example like the direct emissions.Will Buchanan: So by direct emissions. you're talking about, let's say the scope, two of the operational costs of the model.Chris Adams: Yeah, there'll be things that we have, there's an external impact. Or there is a, we use this phrase scope four, for example, to talk about all the other things that induce in, in, in the world. But there is a kind of stuff which happens inside the system boundary that we've spoken about. And presumably that's something we should be caring about as well.Right. So there'll be steps that we can take to make the, the use of AI, particularly like say the, the model is more efficient and more effective and, or all these parts here. This is something that we should be looking at as well, presumably. Right.Will Buchanan: And so in our paper, which Isgoing to be published, I think on Monday, we've calculated the emissions of several different models. And one of them was a 6 billion parameter transformer model and the operational carbon footprint was equivalent to about a railcar of coal. And that's just for training . So it's really imperative that we address this and provide transparency around this.Lynn Kaack: that for developing a model or for training at once? I mean, is that with grid search architecture, search.Will Buchanan: For a single training run. So it does not account for sweeps or deployment.Chris Adams: right. So there's a, there's some language that we haven't heard for here, so, but maybe it might be worth it. maybe will, could you maybe talk about just briefly, you said a rail car full of coal. I don't actually know what that is. I mean, in metric terms, what does that look like? Okay.Will Buchanan: A hundred million grams. I don't have the conversion handy, but we took the US EPA greenhouse cast equivalencies, and I should add the methodology that we applied was the green software Foundation's SCI. So we calculated the energy consumed by the model and multiplied it, multiplied it by the carbon intensity of the grid that powers that data center.Chris Adams: Cool. And that was per training run? So that wasn't the, in the, the creation of the entire model, is that correct?Will Buchanan: correct.Abhishek Gupta: That's the other interesting part as well, right? When you're thinking about the life cycle is or life cycle of the model, I should say, because life cycle has multiple meanings here, which is that once that model's out there, what are the inference costs? Right. And are we, are we, if, if, if this is something that's gonna be used.You know, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of times, if it's something, you know, if it's, if it's a large model that's, you know, now being used as a pre-train model and is going to be fine tuned on by, by other folks downstream. Are we able to then, you know, talk about amortization of that cost across all of those use cases.And again, Again, I think what becomes interesting and, and is, is how do we account for that stuff as well? Right? Because we don't have complete visibility on that as well. And, and I know Lynn's nodding here because her paper that's, I think coming out, getting released in an hour and a half, actually the embargo gets lifted on our paper, actually talks about some of those system level impacts.And maybe, maybe learn you wanna chime in and talk a little bit about that as well.Lynn Kaack: Yeah, thank you so much. Exactly. So I think what's a crucial number that we're currently still missing is not what is emitted from a single model in a well known setting. But what is emitted overall from applying machine learning? So what are the usage patterns and practices like how often do people develop models from scratch?How often do they train or retrain them? People? I mean, of course organizations and typically larger organizations and companies. And how do they perform inference on how much data, how frequently. There are some numbers out there from Facebook and Google and in their large scale applications actually inference outweighs their training and development costs in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.So inference might become a bigger share depending on the application. So we really need to understand better how machine learning is being used in practice. Also to understand the direct emissions that come from.Chris Adams: An inference is a use of a model once it's in the wild. Is that what an inference is in this case? So there's an environment. So you could think of the making part and then there is the usage part from the inference, right? So is that how that part works?Lynn Kaack: exactly. So if you use a model on a data point, we call that inference. So you've fed the data and given you a result. Then training means you. Sort of train a single configuration of the model once on your training data set. And then development is what I refer to as if you search over different configurations of the model.So there are lots of hyper parameters that you can use. Adjust to achieve better performance. And if new models are being developed, then there's an extensive search over those hyper parameters and architecture configurations. That then of course gets really energy intensive because we are training the model thousands of times, essentially.SoWill Buchanan: really. Me, I think Nvidia posted on their blog that referencing accounts for about 80 to 90% of the carbon costs of a model. And I think Lynn, in one of your papers, it was Amazon had also claimed around 90%. So these are really non-trivial costs and I'm not aware of any framework to measure this.Lynn Kaack: That Amazon number just to be clear is costs. So monetary costs that came from a talk, but there are numbers now published. Google and Facebook, but they look at some applications of theirs where inference outweighs training in terms of energy consumption. They're not exact numbers. It's not entirely clear which applications those are, but there is some data, at least that shows that.And I think it just highly depends on the application that you're looking at. And sometimes, you know, you build a model and then you do inference once and you have the data set that you, and then in other types, you build a model and then you apply it a billion times. so of course that can then add up to a lot more energy consumption.Chris Adams: Wow. I didn't realize that was actually an issue cuz most of the numbers I've seen have been focusing on the training part. So, well I think this is something we spoke about before that training. There's there's, there's a kind of trend in the use in. Use from, from training already. Is this something, cuz I've seen figures from open AI and, but my assumption was that basically computers are journey getting more efficient about twice as efficient every two years or so with like Moore's law or kumis law or things like that.But if you are seeing an uptick in usage here, is, does that mean that they're staying about the same or is there, is there, is there a trend that we should be taking into account?Will Buchanan: So I think the computational costs of training have been doubling every 3.4 months or so. And so I think the trend is only accelerating. The models are just getting larger and larger and you've got, I think GT three is one of the largest. Ones around at this point, I think we might challenge Moore's law.Chris Adams: Okay. So if Moore's law is doubling, once every two years, I mean, what is the impact of doubling every 3.4 months? I mean, over a few years, what does that work out to be? Because I don't think I could do the exponential numbers, the exponential math, but it sounds like it's, it sounds like a pretty big number, basically dub if something is doubling on a, every three or four months, right.Will Buchanan: I also don't have the math handy, but I think it's important to note here and Abak was talking about this earlier. These models are very flexible, So,you can train them once and then provide some fine tuning or transfer learning approach on top of them, and then repurpose these models for a number of different applications.And then you can even compress them. Let's say, using OnX runtime, so you can be very efficient and you can really amortize the cost of that.Abhishek Gupta: Yeah, just building on Will’s point there's a lot of work on quantizing the weights of a trained network, applying distillation approaches using. And model approaches that actually helps to shrink down the model quite a bit, especially with the whole push for tiny ML, trying to shrink down models so that they can be deployed on the on edge devices has been something that's helped to manage to, to a great extent the, the, the computational impacts. One of the other things that I wanted to highlight as, as you know, will was talking about Mo models getting larger is there's this almost fetish. In the world today to continuously scale and keep pushing forever larger models in, in, in chasing soda as, as they would say.So chasing state of the art, you know, which is, is great for academic publications, where you get to show, Hey, I improve state of the art performance on this benchmark data set by 0.5% of whatever. Right. And in performance, I think what what's being ignored is that. That has a tremendous, tremendous computational cost.In fact, one of the hidden costs that I think doesn't get talked about enough is there's this statistic out there that, you know, 90% of the models don't make it into production. And that kind of relates to things like, you know, neural architecture search and, you know, hyper parameter tuning, where you're constantly trying to refine a model to achieve better performance.A lot of that actually goes to waste. Because that stuff doesn't make it into production. So it's actually not even used. And so there's a whole bunch of computational expenditure that is done that actually never sees the light of day and never becomes useful. That obviously has environmental impacts, right?Because of the operational and embodied carbon impacts. But none of that actually gets talked about, reported, documented anywhere because, well, who wants to know that, Hey, I trained, you know, 73. Different, you know, combinations to get to where I'm at. You just talk about the final results.Chris Adams: Okay. Let's say that if you don't wanna go down one of those rabbit holes, what should you be using? Or where would you start if you wanted to start applying some of these ideas about greener AI in your work on a daily basis, do not have anything that they would lead with. For example,Will Buchanan: is not always better. Sometimes you really should choose the right tool for the job. We've had some really great graduate student projects. University of Washington's information school and they built some case studies and samples around green AI. As an example, a project led by Daniel Chen was comparing a sparse or a dense model for an anomaly detection setting.And they found that using sparse meaning less trees and a shallow being smaller depth per tree, random forest would save a massive amount of carbon and provide the equivalent accuracy. So I think it saved about 98%. In terms of the monetary cost and energy.Chris Adams: Okay. Uh, wow. That's bigger than I was expecting. What would you say to people if they're in production, they're trying to do something.Lynn Kaack: I think. The big goal should be to not only develop more energy efficient machine learning models, but then also ensure that those are actually being used. And surprisingly, even sometimes within the same company, certain model developments are not being passed onto other parts of the company. So really trying to develop stand up models that are now also being used and practiced is important.So interoperability of energy, efficient machine learning models. So,Chris Adams: Someone does wanna look at their stuff and they do want to apply some of these ideas. You spoke a little bit about using some other models. Where would you suggest people look, if they wanted to operationalize some of the kinds of wins or some of the better ways to make green software greener? For example, I realize you've got a paper coming out and you work on this day to day.So yeah. What would you point us to?Lynn Kaack: I mean, as I understand, there's a lot of ongoing research in the machine learning community for energy efficient machine learning. So. I don't have any names on top of my head in terms of workshops or community resources, where one can see what are the most energy efficient model types for specific application.I know that there are some very comprehensive papers also that summarize all the different research approaches that are being taken. But I would encourage you if you are looking for using like a, a deep. Learning models of some kind, just inform yourself quickly if there's also a leaner version of it. So many of them like widely used models, like bird, for example, smaller versions that can almost do the same thing.And, maybe your performance doesn't suffer much. If you're using a much lighter model.Chris Adams: Okay, so lighter models and looking around what we have there. And will, is there a paper or a source you might point toWill Buchanan: It's actually gonna talk about the carbon aware paper that we're about to publish, but I think that's a slightly different track.Chris Adams: That's up next week, right? So that will be the 13th or 14th of June. That's when that'll be visible. Correct.Will Buchanan: Exactly.Chris Adams: Okay. Cool. All right, then there's a load more that we could dive into. We've got copious, copious, copious show notes here. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna say thank you everyone for coming in and, and sharing your wisdom and your experiences with us.And hopefully we'll have more conversations about green software in future. Thank you folks.Asim Hussain: Hey everyone. Thanks for listening. Just a reminder to follow Environment Variables on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please do leave a rating and review. If you like what we're doing, it helps other people discover the show. And of course we want more listeners to find out more about the Green Software Foundation. Please visit greensoftware.foundation . Thanks again, and see you in the next show.

In this episode Asim Hussain is joined by guest Chris Lloyd-Jones; Head of Open Technologies at Avanade and co-chair of the Open Source Working Group at the Green Software Foundation, and Dan Lewis-Toakley; Green Cloud Lead at ThoughtWorks and co-chair of the Open Source Working Group at the Green Software Foundation. They discuss the benefits of open source versus closed source, what tools are already out there and  how open source can help reduce software emissions.Learn more about our guests:Dan Lewis-Toakley: LinkedIn / Twitter / GitHubChris Lloyd-Jones: LinkedIn / TwitterAsim Hussain: LinkedIn / Twitter Episode resources:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter Green Software Foundation SummitIf you enjoyed this episode then please either:Follow, rate, and review on Apple PodcastsFollow and rate on SpotifyConnect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!Transcription below:Chris Lloyd-Jones: If everyone has their data out in the open that they don't feel precious, like they're being compared in a negative way, this incentives to make things better, or you also let all of these open source tools consume from a curated, trusted data source. So open source is almost like that trusted gate for good.Asim Hussain: So welcome to this podcast episode. My name is Asim Hussain I'm the executive director and chairperson of the Green Software Foundation. And I'm also the green cloud advocacy lead at Microsoft.Chris Lloyd-Jones: Hello. I am Chris Lloyd-Jones. I am one of the co-chairs of the open source working group, that Green Software Foundation. And I'm also head of open technologies at Avanade.Dan Lewis-Toakley: Hi folks. I'm Dan Lewis-Toakley. I'm based in Brooklyn, New York. And I'm also a co-chair of the open-source working group at the Green Software Foundation. And I'm the green cloud lead at ThoughtWorks in North America.Asim Hussain: it's actually just so amazing to have so many people. Uh, Mike focused on grid software and you know, in these environments. So Chris CLJ Chris Lloyd-Jones. So you are at a conference today and you're talking to people about open source software and green open source software.Chris Lloyd-Jones: Yeah, that's correct. I am at bill today or specifically I'm at the UK chapter in Reading and London. And it's a pretty timely topic based one because I co presented this morning on green software. And there's a really big discussion started with the Green Software Foundation. Then we quickly moved on to CNCF the DPIA and tons of other open source communities.What was cool is everyone's first thought was how can we work with each other? And also all I see is green software.Asim Hussain: Yeah. So out of interest, what are people, what is the general impression of people as to what is green software? Cause this is a question which is just, I think, going to constantly be redefined year and year.Chris Lloyd-Jones: It's interesting actually, because I've seen three broad definitions. The first one was sustainability with technology. So anything from sustainability, like sustainability cloud things like how you track people around your building to make them more efficient. So using technology to make things greener, then there was software.From my quantity, intrinsically green. So making code greener and less emissions. And I think that the final piece is kind of some combination of the two. So things like using green software for carbon accounting, which was interesting. So I don't really consider that cause I tend to assume that a lot of the accounting protocols that blockchain are inherently not green, which I might be a bit out of date on now, but yeah, three definitions there.Asim Hussain: When both of you talk about kind of green because you both lead the open-source working group in the foundation. What do you think of when you say, if someone says, what is green open source software, whereas open-source green.Dan Lewis-Toakley: I can, I can have a stab, uh, same, I suppose, maybe two starting points. One is open source information. I suppose it doesn't necessarily need to be code, right. It could be data or research, but open and readily available tools. Frameworks of research that help enable. Practitioners in the technology space to build software that is green on what we mean by that is software that consumes less energy, particularly dirty energy, and that emits less carbon.And so we've got quite a wide gambit within the Arkansas working group to sort of explore and discover and help drive and accelerate projects, open source projects that help really enable that space. I think. Been predominantly our focus over the last year, but I think another component is trying to find and understand and accelerate the software itself that is doing things in a green a way.And so maybe leveraging some of those tools or frameworks that we've discovered, but to help create examples of, you know, software that's written in a Greenaway as sort of a ways for others to learn through that process. So some of the ways that I'd like to think.Chris Lloyd-Jones: Yeah, I guess I probably agree with that. So I liked the way you started. Cause I think about three opens, open data, open software and open hardware. So kind of sharing. Sharing those different approaches to kind of collaboration and making a lot of important information available outside of large corporates for the common.Good. And then for me, green software, I do think about carbon and reducing electricity, but I also like to think about the planetary boundaries theory, which are pretty, always banging on. But was thinking about in future, how might we think about e-waste pollution and even vague things like land usage, reducing chemicals, which are much harder to, to affect in any way as software engineers, but I still think we could have something.Asim Hussain: I think, I think that's one of the space that's kind of what the challenges that we've had is. You're trying to get really focused in on this space. I think required a lot of, you know, narrowing down, not on down the targets. And a lot of us really talk about carbon emissions and things like that. But, you know, you're talking a Palm tree bound.There are other things, there are other problems. Believe it or not. There's other problems in this, in this world other than just carbon emissions. But, and I think you're right. I think we will over time kind of open that, open that gate open. I don't quite feel that way. We're getting there, but I don't feel quite feel like the carbon, the carbon problem has been solved just yet.Although I was kind of worried, cause I know we'd be trying to Bovis, which is another non and they released actually they released their open source API, the carbon API, and one of the things it does. I forgot Chris, what the different, it, it, it tells you that carbon emissions is it's an API where you can provide it, you know, adjacent.Description of this is the, these are the machines I'm working on. This is how many, how much CPU or use et cetera, and returns you, not just your carbon emissions estimate, but also think it was primary energy. And I forgot what the other one that we're returning a biotic,Chris Lloyd-Jones: Yeah, that was a whole set of manufacturing. So they broke it down and put the different scopes and they scope 1, 2, 3, and broke it down in that way, which, which was interesting.Asim Hussain: but, but also beyond, beyond carbon, it was also.Chris Lloyd-Jones: All the mineralsAsim Hussain: Mineral. Yeah. Yeah.Chris Lloyd-Jones: and reclamation.Asim Hussain: yeah. Yeah. And, and, and that stuff as well, which I think is interesting there, they're also like looking to broaden out the scope of green to beyond just carbon it's other things.Chris Lloyd-Jones: I like that because my concern is where is the tipping point? Because so many organizations have net zero carbon targets, you know, either in the next few years or decades in the future. Do you think that now is the time to stay narrow, but eventually we may have to widen out because otherwise if you leave it too late, Who's addressing the other problems, but yeah, I think now we're still in a good space at the moment.Asim Hussain: Yeah.Dan Lewis-Toakley: Which, which isn't it really interesting. Right. Because as what building these tools and frameworks, we want to architect things in a way that delivers value in the short term, in terms of, you know, quantifying and measuring carbon emissions. But we don't want to build in a way that it's going to be really difficult in the future to consider other factors.And so we want to think about our interfaces and design tooling in the space that can be extensible to like future future use cases, not beyond carbon, which is like really interesting problem to think about.Asim Hussain: Well beyond the carbon, that's a, that's a good title for something Matisha wall.Dan Lewis-Toakley: Maybe a future podcastAsim Hussain: It's a podcast. Yeah. Podcast. And I think, I think, I think you, you hit on something that as well, Christmas is like, you know, it's about the targets. So like organizations that, so if an organization sets a net zero target, that's a target relates to carbon and therefore all of the underlying infrastructure and tools and everything tools up to, to, to solve the carbon price.But then as Oregon, I don't know what an equivalent, I have no idea. Actually one equivalent target would be for some of these other things. Like I know Microsoft, they also look at, I want us to just want to say the word water. I want to say potable water. Like, you know, water scarcity is, is, is one of the key things that are looking at and he works and they have set targets for that as well.It's just not as high as the carbon target. Like if you want to get something done, you talk about the conference.Chris Lloyd-Jones: In a way, I feel like it's because carbon isn't easy, but it's graspable now in a way that it wasn't the. And I think the UN SDGs are at that same level of the greenhouse gas protocol, the way that that was in that high-level government global target. But we now need to do that same work of translating it into impactful actions that we as individuals can have.There's a great book called mission economy, which looks at things like the NASA, the NASA moonshot, and how you can identify these bold challenges to make the targets achievable. Like what you're talking about, like NetSuite.Asim Hussain: I like that a lot. Yeah. Yeah. So what are those opiates? I would say in general was just kind of general around run, run, run, run, run, focus a little bit. But what are some of, what are some kind of open source projects that you could point to? Some, some, maybe some of the stuff working in the foundation, but also stuff outside of it related to, you know, green, what does exposed some green open-sourceChris Lloyd-Jones: I'll probably refer to when a dance actually, first of all, cause it's one that I actually use. AndAsim Hussain: and he's, and he's probably not going to refer to it. Cause he's so he's so polite if like.Chris Lloyd-Jones: that's why I wasDan Lewis-Toakley: I didn't want, I didn't want it. Yeah. Thanks Chris. I appreciate that.Chris Lloyd-Jones: the cloud carbon footprint calculator. One of the initiatives that I know you're a part of is which I used a day in, day out tracking kind of. Carbon footprint from many different clouds and helping people to identify where they might be able to shrink that. I think that's great because it's an organization just making something that others needed and just sharing it for the common good.And it does seem to have active pull requests and issues, and people are very welcoming. So that's why I picked.Asim Hussain: Do you know what let's dig into that? Cause that's actually quite interesting because I think that that touches on some interesting areas because. There are some closed source versions of cloud carbon footprint. So that's an interesting angle to talk about that as well. I mean, why, what are some of the advantages of having something like cloud?So just for the benefit of everybody else, cloud carbon footprint, I said, why don't you give us an overview of what cloud carbon footprint.Dan Lewis-Toakley: Yeah. So cloud carbon footprint is an open-source tool, mostly developed by ThoughtWorks where I work, but also we have many contributors in the Arkansas community in some of the members of the Greenstone fire foundation. And the way that the software works as it connects to a cloud provider, API APIs, and it supports AWS Google cloud and Microsoft Azure connects to the usage and billing APIs.And then with a custom methodology based on, you know, best practice and academic research, we convert that usage data in terms of compute, storage, networking, and memory. Firstly into a quantified energy consumption or an estimated energy consumption. And then based on publicly available data sets of emissions factors, based on where that cloud usage exists, what data center, the cloud provider, we then convert that into estimate at carbon emissions.And it provides the data in a front end dashboard where you can view it in some, you know, data visualization. You can also just consume it via API or CLI. We wanted to provide a way to understand and explore that data in variety of different ways, based on the context. Recently added support for on prem where you sort of provide your data in a CSV format.And we estimate on, on premise, and also, like you mentioned, with the Bellavista API as SIM, we added support for embodied emissions as well, based on the carbon intensity standard. But yeah, it's, it's a tool we've sort of put out there about a year and a half ago, and it's sort of grown in popularity and usage in that time.So something where hopefully a little bit. And we hope to see people use one thing I will add you notice. I said the word estimated energy consumption. It's not the same as the actual energy data that cloud providers would have of their, their data centers and major cloud providers all sort of provide different tooling uses.More potentially more accurate and measured approaches for the usage. But as you say, it's sort of closed box in some it's to varying degrees. It's a little bit of a black box in terms of where that data is sourced. And so there's interesting trend. Like we went for a trade-off of easier access to the data, better usability, better overall support with multi clouds because we don't have access to the underlying data.So there's that trade-off with accuracy versus sort of usability in various.Chris Lloyd-Jones: I liked your mention of reference to close source tooling as well, because one. Your project made me think of a number of things that Green Software Foundation doing. Make me think of it. We launched as a foundation of the software, carbon intensity standard last year and the offer version. And I'm glad that it's done almost early in the development of this software, because there was already starting to be a lot of different organizations measuring their carbon intensity in many different ways.So by having this standard earlier, I feel like it's going to help a lot of these open source and closed source companies, at least settle on a way that they aren't kind of comparable versus incentive to drive carbon down.Dan Lewis-Toakley: This is more being out of our longer-term planning, but we've talked a lot about. Uses of these various tools or software could optionally opt into sharing some of the statistics or data about maybe their company size number of employees, industry, and, and some of the outputs of these various tools into some sort of centralized way to understand comparatively across injury industries.What does good look like? What does not good look like? So not just you internally using the sci to measure against yourself, but how could you compare against competitors? Other comparable organizations in some way. I think we might be a little bit a way off from achieving that, but it'd be really interesting to think about.Asim Hussain: Yeah, that's a really good, good point. I think it might just only happen because it's cause you're talking about using the cloud carbon footprint as an SEI measurement is what you described.Dan Lewis-Toakley: I believe we haven't implemented the sci yet within cloud carbon footprint, but it's definitely on the.Asim Hussain: Yeah, just, just in case you haven't mentioned it for the audience, because we get getting into that phase of, of, of, of our field where we just, we just kind of dive straight into our own kind of terminologies. The sea is a, is a, is a measured methodology has been developed in the foundation. For essentially scoring a software application for carbon emissions.So just, just going back to the cloud common for it. Cause I think it's an interesting thing that there's a debate out there, an old debate, you know, open source versus closed source. You know, what are the advantages disadvantages of each? I think this is again, just a great example because every single cloud vendor had a podcast episode about talking about all the various cloud and, and, and there are different, everyone will have their own, their own measurement tool.And with cloud carbon footprint is an open source one. And I think one of the interesting things about that is it's actually a lot easier to engage with. Because of the openness, you know, when you don't remember Dan, when you reached out to me, kind of in very my, my Microsoft hat to, to engage, it was actually quite challenging to get people to kind of start having those conversations with you because everybody's in there thinking, well, what can, what can we say?Like, I don't want to reveal anything. This has been NDA signed and all this other stuff. Whereas as soon as something becomes open source, boom becomes easy. It's easy. It enables that collaboration and everybody can just see the work that you're doing. They can verify it. There's not, there's no hoops to jump over and that's kind of one of the Clare kind of advantages of open source I would see is.Is or whatever. I don't even know what word to use described, but I just said like collaboration. Well, I suppose it's the whole, the fundamental nature of open-source is collaboration. Anyway, I see. No, it's not, I'm rambling. I'm rambling now, but it's it's to be open, but it enables collaboration in a way which closed source solutions.Don't.Chris Lloyd-Jones: It cuts through legal. And governance technical barriers too, because I mean, I don't think it's just a green thing. I mean, if you look mid pandemic, there are lots of people struggling with solutions for vaccine passports, and you had cities and towns in the U S collaborating with universities across Europe, collaborating with small villages from Australia.And can you imagine those sort of. Very geographically and size different organizations collaborating without open-source it wouldn't have happened. So it provides visibility, I guess, on a shared platform.Asim Hussain: Yeah. With closed source. You can't like your methodology is fully is out there. It's completely out there. Every single number and people can review it and back it up. And it builds that trust. In, in UCA, essentially, you're creating something which provides data, which makes decisions, but everything is, is, is out there and open to be reviewed, which is a real advantage.Chris Lloyd-Jones: One of the things, which yeah. Yeah. I mean, I love open source. It's what I do day in, day out. I want to be real. There are challenges which organizations and people need help overcome. I mean, first of all, you get a lot of people working on that side of their desk around the day job. And I guess in the foundation, we probably even seen it.That means that people might take their name to project, but not how to time commit or things get spun up and they go stale. I think open source is sometimes seen as a panacea for let's just get something cool, done without thinking about all the hard work and support that needs to go to make that work.Dan Lewis-Toakley: Yeah, I was going to say something similar to Christian that open source doesn't mean that you don't need things like leadership and project manage. And product development and thinking, right? Like there are still some of those, those core roles and responsibilities that would be required with any in-house software development team is still sort of required.It might be a little bit more piecemeal in that it's provided by different community members and sort of globally at different times zones around the world. Some of those key aspects to successful software development is still a still really, really important. And oftentimes I've seen organizations just, oh, there's this, like, let's use this open-source tool, bring it in.And they, you know, don't actually invest some of the time to understand how it's working or, or invest time in investing back into the tool itself. So there's still, it's still somewhat some of that work involved. One other note I'll make is that you mentioned the. Sort of things, Chris, I think we thought long and hard about the license that we were going to use for cloud carbon footprint.And for us, we settled on the Apache two, which has a similar in terms of permissiveness to MIT. And it's, we still do is really important to have a license that allowed anyone, any organization or individual in the world to use the software in any way they wanted. If, if that meant they were going to take cloud carbon footprint code and build a page closed source service using that.That was okay for us, because for us it wasn't, it's about engaging the community and growing adoption of this tool and similar tools rather than necessarily holding it tight to our chest and trying to have the secret sauce that you know, that we want to provide to our clients or to partners. So that was a, that's sort of a key ask to get different license types, more restrictive ones can often be a deal breaker for some companies and organizations to adopt.Chris Lloyd-Jones: Yeah, I don't know about you, but sometimes it can also feel like, you know, when you got. Holding a sweet and you have to kind of prize their fingers off it at times for an organization that can be quite hard to make that decision. And I say that because we we've contributed some code as Avanav to the Green Software Foundation is to start with that CICB pipeline tooling.But one of the reasons why I pushed for that is because I also think. That secret source, close to your heart. You run the risk of people. First of all, jumping over you because they just want to get things done. They want to get things done quickly. What you do becoming out of date and stale when you've invested a whole load of time and something which isn't compatible with what people are now using.You can also just look like a bad actor, particularly in fields like this, where we're not, I don't know, making a search tool in comparison to that whole open search elastic search for Roy. We're trying to actually solve a problem here. We're fundamentally, if the world doesn't go near zero, we might all die in a massive heat.Death has good reasons to do it.Asim Hussain: I think that's also where this is one of the things that I recognized early on the foundation, because Hey, look, let me be honest. Both of you work for organizations that. Our competitors, let's just be out front your competitors. Right. But the, yeah, but, but your, but what's wonderful. I realized is that open is, is a way you can collaborate with each other because there is an underlying layer.Every single time you talk to a customer and you're going to be implementing something as an underlying layer of trying to solve a problem, which is common. And that's kind of really what the advantage of open source. And then I love the fact that you use that, that permissive licensing. I always say, even at the foundation we've used, we've used MIT for some of the, uh, for since before content is, is creative commons.I forgot the one way you can just make a derivative and just rename and sell it the most. Cause that's cause it's all about how do you kickstart this ecosystem than, than anything else? The open-source is again, collaboration between. Method of collaboration between organizations that would typically be competitors.I think.Chris Lloyd-Jones: Yeah. And it's nice to be able to set that aside, but also you avoid all the antitrust concerns operating out in the open in a way. It also removes a lot of the, kind of the way whom I did this year, the best cause people could see what he worked on. They can see each one of these meetings, which means we recognize the contributions of those that don't.Which is an important piece. It's often overlooked because consensus meetings, design discussions is important. It's everything else, but you can also see the code and the minutes, which is nice.Dan Lewis-Toakley: I don't know about you both, but I love feedback. Like I love getting feedback and there's nothing better than, you know, me pushing out some code to a project and then getting a pull request. Correcting me and say that I was like wrong about this. And like, sometimes that can be a challenge, but open source provides so much more scope for have a feedback mechanism from experts and community members.And it allows projects like cloud carbon footprint, but many others to sort of better cost cost, correct. Towards things that are valuable because you have more feedback and more users, you know, giving you yeah. Improvements.Chris Lloyd-Jones: I think open-source is a bit of a mindset as well. Cause I, I'm not going to be at as nice. I sometimes like feedback by half to be in the right mindset to accept it other times I'm like, oh, I just want to get on and do things. But source does get you into that mindset of go actually, no, hang on. They've got a point I'm wrong.I can acknowledge it and we can move on when you're in that head space.Asim Hussain: I think it gets a lot into kind of a psychology and where you are in your life as a human being at the current moment assignments to whether you can, uh, whether you can access. But as soon as I've seen, I've, I've seen feedback where I'm like, that is, that is not okay. Or that's, but then again, even that feedback is public.So you know, that, that conversation that happening in private, so you can then, you know, it's happening and then you can correct them. And, you know, do you think you, you reminded me of something? One of my, I don't know if it's related, I'll say it anyway. What am I kind of like happiest moments of the foundation was one of my first poll requests got rejected or one of my, one of the first time, one of my poll requests got rejected because I was like, Um, thankfully there is like a community of people and they're confident enough to kind of feed back to each other and kind of reject things and accept things.And I was like, excellent. This is going to the stick, the culture's there. It's going to work. They're rejecting being okay with having poor requests. Retracted must be, it must be a really important thing in any kind of open source community.Chris Lloyd-Jones: Yeah. I like the visibility that gives them because it's a bit of learning experience. And as long as it's public of those, then see what the feedback was that they gave to you. That'd be the only thing I struggle with sometimes is. Sure people can give that negative or critical feedback in a way that you can learn from it because you don't want to put off few, two contributors.I feel like if it's your first one, you can also feel a little bit burnt too. Particularly for junior devs. I see them contribute. Once they get strong feedback, I'm like, oh, I'm scared of this now.Dan Lewis-Toakley: I think you mentioned that what culture statement. I think that's really important, like different communities or that are a foundation or a particular pencils projects have different cultures. And I think. Being deliberate about the type of culture that you want to foster is really important. I know that the foundation, early days, we worked on some principles like principles, cultural principles to underpin how we engage within the foundation.I think similar thought process is really useful for openings. Projects having a really grounded code of conduct. Ideally you don't ever need to use the code of conduct, but it's important that it's there in case, you know, people sway away from the intended culture. And Chris, I love your example of like the, that junior devs me and then getting negative feedback.I've seen it happen. I think something that I like to think about is before providing. Direct or constructive feedback, like ask, ask a question instead. Like why ask questions to understand before delivering any sort of judgment or value in terms of people's contribution?Chris Lloyd-Jones: Yeah. Question is, is, is a great one, particularly being out in the open and chatting because. I know internally and in the past, this is certainly something I'd like to think I've learned from. I can see something and I take a negative intention from it. And it goes back to that psychology piece. When you ask often you find that are really good reasons for say why someone did something the way that they did.And it also brings you closer together to work together and future, sorry, we're making open source sound very touchy feely. Now I'm good, but good things get done with open source.Asim Hussain: Now there is it is, it is, it should, it should be is. I think there's a, there's a human component to everything, which I think really does need to be addressed. And I think it's actually, you might, you might need that. Cause that, that was one of the, I'll have to find it right now. Can't find it by. We we wrote, we wrote, I think we wrote in our manifesto assume good intent, which I think is one of the heart we have that shop that Microsoft has all like assume good intent and like ask it enough.And that's the hardest advice. Great advice to give as hard as vice to remember, to use your sound. So, so ways here, but I'm sure there's many times that we kind of fail to do that ourselves. Yeah. Asking that question. Why? Oh, what was your reasoning behind this instead of this? What are your reasoning behind this?And then you realize, oh, that's a really good reason. Oh, that's kind of how it goes. Yeah. So talk a little bit more as great as for us to talk about generally kind of source kind of challenges and solutions. I was wondering, do we want to, do you want to kind of touch on some more of the, the kind of green open source projects that are in that happening?I know Chris, you just mentioned the, as the sci CD tool, I forgot what CICT stands for all of a sudden.Chris Lloyd-Jones: Continuous integration, continuous deployment.Asim Hussain: all right. Okay. There you go.Chris Lloyd-Jones: Yeah, I know that was a contentious naming. And then there's also the carbon where a software development kit. Those are two of my favorite projects that we have because they come at a very similar problem at our different parts of the life cycle. And I'm excited with the fact that the green stuff, I foundations a lot of different roles and people in it.So we put developers, data scientists, we have business folks. And what the carpenter. Well, I start with the CIC D tool. What that does is that lets developers at the moment and just that infrastructure is code, I guess, almost the design patterns for the code that you want to end up in the cloud, that the services which you want deployed in Azure, Amazon, Google, and other cloud providers and forecast what the likely carbon emissions are going to be.We would like to be static code analysis. It's a harder problem. It doesn't do that. So you forecast the carbon west software development kit is almost the next part of the chain. Once you have your applications up in the cloud and you have your infrastructure, this that you instrument them to figure out what times of day should this software run?When is the energy clean? Where should this run? I'm unsure workloads. Then you have tools at the other end that can look at that forecast of both the infrastructure and when software should run, I'll tell you the actual sales. So I feel that we're getting a really whole end to end view of here's the forecast.Here's what actually happened. I was slowly plugging the gaps that every part of what a developer would do is covered. And that makes me really excited.Asim Hussain: I actually hadn't joined the dots between the CACD static analysis and the carbon until just now, because with the CIC, the tool will do is I can point it to my GitHub repository of my entire backend application. And it will just by looking at my Docker files, try and figure out this is this, these are all the instances you're going to probably create.This is probably what the utilization is going to be. And therefore this probably probably what the carbon emissions will be on the carbon or SDK. Is it that, what that does is it essentially gives you your advice? I don't know how to describe it regarding like when is the cleanest time of the day? To run stuff and they never really joined those two together.So we could actually figure the actual carpet emissions and potential carbon emissions are. Oh, wow.Chris Lloyd-Jones: So forward looking and then what Dan's got like the cloud comfort for nasal my step backwards looking viewpoint. So eventually one day we'd get that Delta between this, what we forecast, this is what happened. How can we slowly close that gap and figure out what bits can we improve more? And in an ideal world, every part of everyone's job could just be greened in that way, which would just be.Asim Hussain: One of the thoughts I've had for the longest time is, is, you know, I like the way you phrased it in terms of the software development life cycle.Chris Lloyd-Jones: Yeah.Asim Hussain: that's the way I kind of think about what, what we need to, to get to is kind of one of, wouldn't it be great. If, if, as you're developing code, like on your laptop, you had information there and then that would inform you somewhat about, well, you've just made this.I'm not even gonna call it coaching, but architectural change some sort of change to your software, by the way, it might have, you know, this, you might, it might improve this, this change, my increase, your carbon emissions somewhere else. And then I, and I, then I was imaginable. What's the next stage. And everybody, they even develop as journey is to check something and then push it to some sort of a get lab, get hub, whatever it is, code code repository.And then that's what you're describing. Chris is kind of like that, that started code analysis there. At that point, you know, do some actions, then you can see like, well, my push might coach. Merged in with the actual code base estimates, this, this kind of impact. And then once you actually are deploying the into production, that's when tools like the calc carbon footprint.So yeah, I liked the way that, so I think that's, that's a really good way of thinking about it, kind of all that chain through, um, all of that really has to be open source. I just, I mean, maybe part from the deploying to the cloud providers could come up with their own proprietary way, but everything else in that journey has probably has to be open source.Chris Lloyd-Jones: And even they're collaborating. Cause I mean, if you look at Google homes in Nashville, it's in their interest to make it as easy as possible to get on their cloud. People don't want to be locked in. So in a way, people compete in the quality of their servers.Asim Hussain: That's a contentious point. So it's three dig into that a little bit,Chris Lloyd-Jones: Go for it. Go for it.Asim Hussain: I don't know. Cause I've had that because I think there is this, there is, and I know Chris Adams as well, has this idea as well. If you have open source. If you, if you're building something on some kind of non vendor Lockton opensource system, let's just say, Kubernetes, for instance, you then have the freedom to move, but you can therefore use that power.If provider a is an adherent to some green standard or something you can easily move to provide a B. Is that kind of what your, the open sourceChris Lloyd-Jones: It is. I can see where you're going with that is that when you start to use vendor specific extensions, you then get cruft and little bits of luck and little hooks in your code, like tracking a fish out of the water that make it really hard to move from one to the other.Asim Hussain: But, but also I would all get it. I I've heard. And I, and I, I'm not an engineer in those platforms. I do not, I don't know, first hand noise. This is second hand information, but the more vendor looking you get, the more efficient the actual platform is, does that make sense?Chris Lloyd-Jones: I think that was the case. And I'm going to strongly push back on that one. I will repeat the fact that I am at Microsoft build a Microsoft conference. And later today, I'm going to be talking about as you container apps, but that is built on dapper. Dapper is a non-green project, that distributed application platform, runtime.What that does is it takes all these vendor lock in pieces.Asim Hussain: It's opensource.Chris Lloyd-Jones: totally open source. It was contributed to the cloud native computing foundation. What it does is it hides all these proprietary pieces behind abstractions. So you're not using an Azure SQL database or RDS in Amazon. You're just storing data.You aren't needing to know necessarily how even Kubernetes works. It has different building blocks, calling services, saving data. Publishing observing and secrets. And then it has little adapts. It's that which gives you that developer productivity of moving fast. So you're allowing you to stay efficient, allowing apps to stay small so they can be carbon efficient, Watson not locking you in.And, uh, that to me is the ultimate expression of freedom from one place to another. So it really serves as again, as we can.Dan Lewis-Toakley: Another example I might add is some Spotify. And source backstage tool that provides an interface for developers to deploy resources across all the cloud providers, but many other infrastructure and services as, as sort of like a central dashboard for them to do it. And the reason I mentioned it is we actually recently worked with Spotify to publish a plugin for cloud companies.So, if you're using backstage, you can now sort of install the cloud carbon footprint, plugin connected to your cloud providers and get that same data and data visualization within, within that platform. And I think that's a really neat example of different open source communities collaborating in a way, and adding building blocks together to build better solutions, which I think was really.Chris Lloyd-Jones: Yeah. Sage is another great example because that does a similar thing of dividing up tools into categories, infrastructure monitoring discovery, and let him develop his peak was right for them through that agnostic portal. Yes.Asim Hussain: I see now. So I'm, I'm, I'm standing corrected. Well, what or.Dan Lewis-Toakley: As him, but to your original question, like that efficiency gains or cost gain, I'm going to give you the classic consultant answer. It depends. It depends. It depends on what your goals are, right? If your goal is to get the most efficient bang for your buck, in terms of like dollars spent, then. Deep partnership with a single cloud provider where you can negotiate every single cent for all the instances.Like maybe that produces the best gains because you pay a lot of money for that. But is that your goal is your goal to scale most effectively is your goal developer effectiveness, developer efficiency. It really, it really, it really depends. The tradeoffs. I like to think of software architecture or software in general is trying to pick the least worst decision.Chris Lloyd-Jones: Yeah.Asim Hussain: Right.Dan Lewis-Toakley: There's always trade offs. There's always,Asim Hussain: always always trade off.Chris Lloyd-Jones: People often think of it as, as Lego, but I think as marble run, cause you've got this whole runs, you've got to get the marbles to fit through as quickly as possible. I like that because it shows like the Rube Goldberg desk, like maze of parts and pieces.Asim Hussain: Yeah, that actually fits with me because I play with my sons, but I do play with his novel run a lot. Both of you, you mentioned that Chris, you mentioned dapper and Dan, you mentioned backstage and they essentially sounds like FAFSA. To has mean like bringing up my design patterns from, I did use the code, but facade for essentially kind of the wide range of, you know, not in this example, car providers and kind of their interfaces.Um, so maybe it's like a layer thing. Like, you know, as long as it's a thin layer on. Well, you could have like all the, all the optimizations underneath, but like the interface layer itself is the same and that's kind of where open source comes in. And I was going to say, Dan, like, that's one of the big things about cloud carbon footprint is it's multi-cloud and the only way that could be is if it was the only way a multi-cloud solution could exist.Well, I, I take that back. If there was a startup criticizing or they could do, but th the only realistic way it's going to create as if it's open source, because. Like I can, I think I can say this, but like Microsoft, I think it might be obvious that Microsoft customers like Cisco is car platform, but they also Shakara use other cloud platforms as well.And then there are some questions while you've got your wonderful tool. Like, can you, can you, Microsoft, can you make your carbon measurement tool calculate my Azure and my Google workloads. Unlike Microsoft would never decide legally that's just system minefield. You wouldn't even go in that direction from a closed source tool, but like an open source would actually allow that.So that's kind of like for creating a facade amongst a lots of different cloud providers, lots of different APIs, Chris, I feel has different opinion orChris Lloyd-Jones: No, no, I don't think my would never do it. I mean, look at Azure up. That's exactly what that's trying to do,Asim Hussain: yeah.Chris Lloyd-Jones: but actually a lot of the underlying tech from Azure, there are other cloud providers out there to these open source.Asim Hussain: Yeah. So that's maybe like the mechanism that would allow that kind of cross from the feeling I had is like, if, if, if you can't publish while you're saying your Amazon number is X, then there's then the one, if you could publish that in some open source, if the methodology for why you're calculating numbers and numbers of certain ways public, then that's going to stop you from an illegal.Chris Lloyd-Jones: And does that take us back to the sci data project? Like another open source project, the foundation. We're trying to get providers and vendors and manufacturers to share their data publicly, to prevent these legal concerns. If everyone has their data out in the open that they don't feel precious, like they're being compared in a negative way, there's incentives to make things better.Or you also let all of these open source tools consumed from a curated, trusted data source. So open source is almost like that trusted gates, a good data.Asim Hussain: Yeah, trusted as a thing as the big term, big word there. And I think by the fact that, you know, well, the opensource working group is like a. Objection of people sitting there curating it, experts in the field. That's what gives it the trust because anybody can, I can create a source data in my, my, my, my, I have got several open source projects that no one shouldChris Lloyd-Jones: Heavy burden, but Dan and I and yourself were trusted in this one day. We're going to have our equivalent of elastic search and open search. I'm sure. But like it's, it's cool to be in. And to see where it's all developing at speed.Dan Lewis-Toakley: Chris, you've done a much better job than me at going over the projects in the, your working group. So I might I've barely listed any, I might list one, one more to add alongside the ones you made. Is the, the sci open ontology project, which looks at a different part of the problem domain of the software carbon intensity standard.So when access to the trusted data, which you mentioned, press is totally a problem that we're trying, we're really trying to solve. But another problem let's say you do have the data. Another problem that comes up when trying to utilize the STI standard is where do I draw the software boundary? Let's say you have a, some software running on an instance in the cloud and you have a database and then you have a large number of users maybe accessing that API or something.Do you include all of the end user devices that are being used to access? API. Do you include the networking over the internet to access it, you know, or do you just include the software code that's running, like making those decisions is something that is up to users of the sci. And so the, the open ontology project is about defining a standardized way of making those decisions about how and where you draw the software boundaries.So it can be consistent and a lot easier for people to sort of make those.Chris Lloyd-Jones: Yeah, which is important, I guess it helps the training as well, because I mean, you made an awesome workshop, which again, you shared with us around how to calculate sci. I tried running it, um, our organization. And it's incredible actually, when you get people using tools like the SEI and you see, you think you've written something really clearly and have people adding up all these different kill Afric is averaging them, doing them together, picking different or figures from monks.API calls are as a part of the sci calculation. So the SEO told your project, you mentioned is almost like a training tool to help standardize the way people do that. Yeah, and I will share more details of that workshop in a way, because it was a car crash in a good way. I learned a lot.Dan Lewis-Toakley: Awesome. I'm running meant to be running in a couple of weeks, so yeah.Asim Hussain: my, my, my advice and works, I used to do a little bit shops is like, just make it as simple as you can and then make it 10 times simpler. And you still there still be people struggling. So, yeah, so. We're reaching kind of the end, the end of the hour that we have. I just thought, maybe give, give I'd love to kind of ask you a broad question, actually, each of you to, to, to see what's going on in the world.So, you know, what else in the world of green software has kind of got your attention? Recently? I asked that to Chris first.Chris Lloyd-Jones: Ooh, I feel really put on the spot now, can I take off piece and just pick something which I think is a really cool in open source generally. So that is that the United nations, the us federal government and the European. Have a setup open-source project offices and a collaborating. And a lot of them are looking at digital public good, which includes screen software.So the fact that you have not just your traditional corporate community and other organizations, but also now governments taking apart, that's incredible. As long as their heft and size, doesn't put off other people and having a chilling effect, this is going to be a really great scientific collaboration of the.Dan Lewis-Toakley: I'm going to give you two things that I'm thinking about. One is you sort of touched on this a bit as seam in that the. software delivery life cycle and How we think about that. Something that. With our clients about and partners is there are many ways to solve a problem with software architecture, many different ways, maybe unlimited ways.Imagine if you could model the carbon and energy impact of different software architectures that solve a given domain problem prior to writing any code, um, and make and factor that in as a cross functional requirement with alongside cost and performance and security. Right at the earliest stages before any lines of code is written, anything's pushed to a CICB pipeline.You can at least put some guard rails around the architectural direction that you had in. I haven't seen that done successfully yet. Maybe I missed it, but I think that that would be really cool to think about and something that is sort of top of mind. Secondly, I just want to give a call out to the Green Software Foundation summit coming up next month, you know, dozens of in-person and virtual events all around the world.I'm super excited to see some people in person. In some cases for the first time in a, you know, two years and that yeah. Go to the Green Software Foundation websites, check it out. That it's something on the, on the calendar that I'm really looking forward to.Chris Lloyd-Jones: How could I miss that?Asim Hussain: that Chris, Chris is involved in that. I actually think Chris, I think, I don't think we've ever met in person. Have we? So I'll be meeting you in person at the event. I think the London event. Yeah, yeah, yeah.Chris Lloyd-Jones: There's so many folks, the foundation I need to meet around the place.Asim Hussain: Are you, are you told, I don't know. You don't know, you don't know, you know, people are quite surprised and quite a tall person anyway. Um,Dan Lewis-Toakley: was literally about to say height is the most surprisingAsim Hussain: it's the most upright.Dan Lewis-Toakley: but I'm like, you're so tall or in some cases it's not as though it's like, I have no idea howAsim Hussain: That's what people, yeah. Some people say too.Chris Lloyd-Jones: And I say a lot of the current chairs, many of the projects. So from surrendered project approach, pretty tool and understand average. Someone's going to be there by giants.Asim Hussain: yeah, not in terms of my answer, kind of like one thing that it's just been a number of changes, number of essentially jobs going up recently, one thing I've noticed, you know, in the world of green softwares, a number of jobs with the words, kind of green or relates to green self. I mean, honestly, two years ago, if you didn't claw your role yourself inside your organization, there were no like jobs out there kind of publicly.You know, posted, and it was deeply unlikely. Now I'm seeing, you know, you've both got titles that kind of relate to the degree of software I saw. So Amazon posted up, they've got roles for a sustainable solution. Architects. There's a new role for agreeing that advocacy that Microsoft and I'm seeing more and more, not often, but more and more kind of roles appear in this space.And I think that's one of the most important indicators of the validity of what we're doing, you know? And the moon behind this, there is an ecosystem, the business behind it. And that's really what will drive this, this field, I think, in the, in the future. So can you let a confidence?Chris Lloyd-Jones: Well, I want to say on that is, I think also your lead share from the Green Software Foundation has been a big part of that because I'm going to say I was watching bill near a year ago today when the GSF was announced and I text, I was on holiday. I texted my boss via people. I mean, we're conditioning.Why aren't we in this what's happening. We sh we love green. What we're doing as in that.Asim Hussain: Oh, wow. Is that, was that, was that the, was that the inception story for other? NotChris Lloyd-Jones: Yeah, we were so happy to join.Asim Hussain: yeah. It's really good to you. Yeah. Very good to have it really, really glad you're here. Maybe this is before I wrap up any other information you want to give any, any, any, tell people what they can find you socials or anything.Chris Lloyd-Jones: Sure. So you've called me a few times. That's my initial. So you can find me @sealjay the two animals undescore, the letters CLJ because I, 70 organizations have Chris's so that's always me. Yeah. I don't want to sweater.Dan Lewis-Toakley: Also also on Twitter and get hub the handle DToakley as in DTOAKLEY.Asim Hussain: Wonderful. Thank you so much. Both of you for being our guest today and also being such active participants and chairs of the foundation, your, your leadership. This is just been instrumental in us getting to where we are today. So thank you.Hey everyone. Thanks for listening. Just a reminder to follow Environment Variables on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please do leave a rating and review. If you like what we're doing, it helps other people discover the show. And of course we want more listeners to find out more about the Green Software Foundation. Please visit greensoftware.foundation. Thanks again, and see you in the next show.

In this episode Asim Hussain is joined by guest Anne Currie; Tech Ethicist at Container Solutions and Lecturer in Tech Ethics at the University of Hertfordshire. What are the real factors that drive organisations choices around increasing efficiency within their organisation?  What needs to happen for senior leaders to make sacrifices for sustainability? Can regulation push for real change inside organisations? They discuss the role of middle managers, developers and their love for ops people!Learn more about our guests:Anne Currie: LinkedIn / Website (Sci-fi Novels included!)Asim Hussain: LinkedIn / Twitter Episode resources:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter Green Software Foundation SummitIf you enjoyed this episode then please either:Follow, rate, and review on Apple PodcastsFollow and rate on SpotifyConnect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!Transcript below:Environment Variables_Ep3_TranscriptAnne Currie: We need to be shifting it so that people think how efficient is this and demanding it? I think our power is developers is not to do stuff. It's to demand stuff of the people. We are buying things.Asim Hussain: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discuss the latest news and events surrounding green software. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software.I'm your host. Assamese sane. So welcome to Environment Variables. My name is Asim Hussain. I am the executive director and chairperson of the Green software foundation.Anne Currie: And I am Anne Currie. I'm a tech ethicist. That's a long time veteran technologist, I'm Tech Ethicist for Container Solutions, which is a member of the Green Software Foundation. I'm a lecturer of Tech Ethics at the University of Hertfordshire. And I am a serial startup founder.Asim Hussain: So I'm a serial startup, a failure, which is, I think I will. This is, I think maybe this is an interesting direction to go into the, into the topic because the topic I want to talk about today, it was, how do you make change inside and organizational more specifically? How do you. Make changes relates to green software, the greening of our field in how'd you have those conversations inside organizations.And actually one of the things I have because I've had some success, not a lot, not a lot, not a lot of success, but some success inside the organization, main organization I've worked in while I've kind of gone to space, which is Microsoft. And I often wonder whether the success I've had is linked to all of my startup failures or the failures I've had. And what is a startup, other than trying to convince somebody of something, you know, on the, on the most literally buying into your idea is, is what a startup is. Is that, how is that? How you see it? Do you see similarities?Anne Currie: Absolutely. Yes. Yeah. And it's not just slightly buying in really buying in.Asim Hussain: Yeah.Anne Currie: Yeah.Asim Hussain: I always say like, you, you need to, like, you really need to come out with going off on a tangent, but I always say to be successful in a startup, you need to give a, a poop about $5. And that is because you need to, you need to get somebody to give you $5 and the, you need to care so much about the first, relatively small amount you're going to get.You to put so much energy into it that you need to, which is why, if, if, if you're reasonably successful already, it can be quite difficult to get started because you're like, I don't really care about the first $5. Um, I want the billion, but yeah, cause I, I remember maybe describe like, what what'd you describe, you had some, some successes inside your organizations you worked in, in, in, or even, not even in the organization, but generally regarding spreading the word of Greenville.Anne Currie: Well, actually for me, green software is a relatively recent thing. I've been, I've been pushing it for in my career. I've been pushing efficient software for a long time. And I got, I started down this route. Based on pushing software efficiency. And I found that it really doesn't sell at all. It's I really thought, well, if I can sell people on cutting costs that who doesn't want cutting costs is always on people's lists of things they want to do.But what I realized was unless it's the number one thing on my list. Like, there'll be, they'll take the meetings with you. They'll talk to you. But fundamentally what they'll actually want you to try to do is solve the problem, which is at the top of their list, which for development organizations is always developer products.Asim Hussain: Yes.Anne Currie: That's and the machine productivity will all add cost is always secondary to solving their developer productivity. So you go in trying to sell them on efficiency. And what they actually want you to do is to increase the fee is increasing the developer productivity of their teams. And I had to change the message.And, and I'll talk to you a little bit. I have to talk about how I changed the green message to align it with. So I had, I had a bit of an epiphany. I was cause I used all of talking about developer efficiency, efficiency of our containers, Docker containers and that kind of stuff. And I was giving a talk at a conference HashCorp EU, about that.And the person who was immediately before me was Mitchell Hashimoto, who was the, uh, who's the founder of, of HashCorp. I've watched a couple done, fantastic work around, no match, no match scheduler about increasing the efficiency of hosting applications. And my talk was all about increasing efficiency. His talk was all about.No one could sell increasing efficiency because all anybody cared about was developer efficiency and they didn't care how much it costs to make the lives for their developers simpler. So they were, they were having, they were basing everything off that. And I thought, yeah, I really need to change my message here because he was quite right.That it is, it is all that anybody cares.Asim Hussain: Is it, I think, and I just inserted it's up to you, but I think it's because we cost too much. I talk about this. We're very, if you to look at the costs of the cloud workload infrastructure, and it can be quite significant, I will admit, but the cost to developers and also the opportunity cost of your developers.I think you, you, you, it's not just the cost, the developers with like, if they weren't there and they weren't doing what they're doing, your, your competitors are doing something and that might so. Fearful thing that you just got to deliver as fast as possible. You've got to be in the market first and that, that drives a lot of the investment.Anne Currie: Yeah, absolutely. It does enable developers to move on. And, you know, I've, I've run development teams in the past. And hiring developers is really, really hard. It's hard to get them. And it's hard to get ones that are not going to be a disaster when they appear. So nobody wants anybody to leave. No one wants, no one wants to, everyone's desperate to hire people, but, and they want to just get the most out of them when they're in.They do not want to spend any time on anything else unless they have.Asim Hussain: Yeah. So how so, how have you changed? How have you managed to change the narrative somewhat to support kind of greening of software systems? Like what arguments.Anne Currie: Well, I, cause I started, I'll tell you what didn't work for me. So I started describing efficiency improvements and things like, because I'm quite old. And I used to work on backend servers in the nineties and everything was written in C and exchange and things like. Which, which are a hundred times more efficient than Mo, than modern equivalents often, usually in fact, so, you know, it was, it, it there's so much efficiency to be gained by just write, using a more lightweight language.You see, you could use rust or whatever, but that's landed appallingly people, developers went, oh yeah, that's true. But then never be able to get signed off on it because it's too expensive and slows what slows them down. Those languages are very inefficient for develop. Unless they're absolutely necessary.So unless you're writing something that's super high performance and therefore has to run at crazy speeds. Everybody's just going to go look, let it run more so late. Let me pay for more hosting that burned more carbon in the atmosphere and, and I'll have it in Python. And thank you very much.Asim Hussain: But I'd also argue that. I mean, it's not always the language that dictates how efficient or inefficient the code is. Oftentimes. I mean, you can write extremely inefficient code in C and you can write extremely shockingly efficient code in JavaScript. Make fun of JavaScript. You can write incredibly if you, if you, if he understand the language really well, you need to be good at what you do.But what I was surprised me was that it doesn't really matter because the end of the day, all that matters. Yeah. People are happy to ship inefficient, pour quality code that delivers on the functionality to whatever agreement that is required to meet the business goals. Yeah.Anne Currie: I agree. That's all that people care about is shipping quickly and that it basically works. That's. So I changed my pitch a little bit to, well, how can I, how can we go to something more systemic? So rather than have developers tune their code and make it all efficient and super amazing. Can we put pressure on somebody else who is making that case?It's a big hit, super efficient, so specialists so that there are two, two parts to play. As there you've got the pipe cloud providers who are providing services, can you make their hosting efficient? And can you make their services efficient? And can you make them offer more services at the tar green and efficient?And then the second thing is, can you make open source projects start to. Really targets, carbon efficiency and offer those carbon aware features and things like that. Now, I haven't really looked at it. I, at the time I went full hell for leather on cloud, but we also, I think, need to start working on, on the open source side of things.Asim Hussain: I mean, I I'm constantly reminded that how much open source is actually used in every single project. I mean, the GIP team tell me that it's about 90% of an enterprise stack. Open source. And actually some of the things that they've mentioned to me in the past also is hotspots. Like there are, I mean, if you're in the organization, I think actually if you can, you can navigate the public database of open source projects.And there are like a few key libraries that are used every. You know, if you look they're there. So there, those are the hotspots and any improvements in code efficiency, which is not something I'd necessarily like to talk about, but that, that those are the places where you probably should put effort into code efficiency because the impact is magnified so many times from an open source perspective.Anne Currie: I mean, things like service meshes. If you're, if you're running Kubernetes, the service mesh runs all the time and it is it's on demand and it's often horrendous. It's like, you know, mining Bitcoin on your applications. Absolutely redness. So there are some coming on the market that are more efficient, but at the most.It's not necessarily the key selling points of those things. I think we need to be shifting it so that people think how efficient is this and demanding it big. I think our powers developers is not to do stuff it's to demand stuff of the people. We are buying thingsAsim Hussain: Ah, yes. Yeah.yeah. Using our purchasing power to, for the good, but isn't, isn't it? Cause that, that has been my experience kind of throughout, throughout this whole. You know that this whole process, you might, you might get some buy-in. If you're talking to your leadership, you're talking to different organizations, you might get some buy-in, but I always describe as grace and favor is through the grace and favor of a leader who sacrifices some sort of form of some sort of metric that they are being heavily measured upon to just, well, let's give sustainability.This is important to me. The number of senior leaders who've mentioned to me that, that children. Saying things to them at the dinner table, as well as driven them. I mean, I think that is, I I've heard of that statement before, but I, I really believe it now is kind of as there's an aspect of that, but it's through grace and favor and you might get, I mean, it's not the worst thing in the world.You might get a project kick-started, you might be able to do some research or something along those lines, but it will not scale. It just will not scale to any, to any large. And until you can align what your offering to what they're getting measured upon. And I think that's really what they are getting measured upon is the challenge.And no one is currently significantly getting measured against sustainability. If it was, I think sort of the things that some of the conversations we have, it will be very, very different.Anne Currie: um, my suspicion is that, I mean, Isn't it. It's not like I love the cloud providers. You'll worry aboutAsim Hussain: I should be more in that.Anne Currie: your threat. I don't love the cloud providers, but I think they are soft targets. And that if you, you know, it kinda, it's aligned with people. If you say it will make your life more easy. If you use cloud services and cloud services agreed, then you kind of like you're selling your life is more easy and also you get green for free, but I'm, I'm thinking one of the sales in the future would be, I know full well people hate to measuring things and having to report that's terrible.Everybody hates doing that. So I suspect. Being able to use cloud services where you can just say, oh, give me your report. Here's the report I didn't have to do anything is actually another USP for cloud.Asim Hussain: It is a USP, but I think interestingly, it becomes cause then these cloud provider has to offer a different value proposition of that reporting. And then you get into, like, I just probably went to get in trouble saying this, but we really have to be really convenient. If every single cloud.provider just gave the same report,Anne Currie: Yeah, the net. We're going to do thatAsim Hussain: but because there's no, there's no capability then saying, well, our reports are better than the next person's reports.Right? You don't. Cause it's all constantly between the cloud providers. It's all about, I would say is jokingly saying that there's so much more that than. You can say this argument for all of life, to be honest with you, there's so much more that those is commonality between his and his difference. Like the different, like you've got a piece of code, it needs to run it on someone else's computer is pretty much the same between the Google, the Amazon, the Microsoft app.It's all pretty much the same. We have, but we focus in on the, on the differences. Like what are the key difference at differentiators between them? And I think this has just been one of the differentiators, like reporting is just another thing to be differentiating. It's very few areas where there's a lot of focus on, on standardization.Anne Currie: I can also see why they did that. I mean, so I don't have any inside knowledge of any of these, but I remember hearing a stat that I found quite musing about Microsoft that might stop now hires more lawyers than engineers.Asim Hussain: I don't know. I honestly couldn't tell you if that was true. I should probably also acknowledge it right at the start. My other affiliation is towards Microsoft. I don't think, I think I would probably rerecord the start maybe in the kind of acknowledged that also. But yeah, my I'm most of the green cloud because Microsoft, so I do have some insight into that.Anne Currie: But I can see why, if you were a lawyer, you would want to steer clear of standardization of reporting on the green side, because then you, you introduce a liability. Then if you just say, oh, it's hand-wavy about this, then you want to avoid someone coming up and saying, well, hang on a minute. I made all of these legally binding reports based on your, your thing.And actually I've just compared it to get to Google and they say, you're wrong.Asim Hussain: But if Yeah.but if you always different as if what you're providing is always different to everybody else, you can always put an argument is there's always a spin on it where standardizations forces you to the same level playing for where you have to then compete on the same rules. And you really do discover who's who's better than the other.I think it's interesting. I think I do. I do. I mean, obviously there's many people inside an organization and everybody has. You know, motivations and it's not all the same and it's not just one voice all the time, but no.one says they want standardization until the standardization happens. And then they really want the standardization because then they, but then cause then they just finally on the same level playing field and then they can compete fairly, but they have to be dragged in. You know what I mean? Which is why I was away for me. Cause I, I spoke this similar stuff. I talking on so many levels of so many people inside organizations about green software. I did have successes, I call and grace and favor successes. You know, you know, people who are willing to just put in investment to, to, to something to see, see how.To the scale investments? No, I'd never really had any successes there. The first time I got the hint that this might not be the right direction or there might be a different direction. Was when we started talking about regulation when there starts to be hints of regulation on the horizon. And one thing I realized, I mean, just the conversations, just the threat of regulation opens more doors.Than anything else. They, for instance, one of the things I've learned early in my years at Microsoft was that you really do have to find customers. You can't just like be waving around going, Hey, I'm really passionate about technology. And I know my area and, and you know, like if we were to build this feature, you know, I, trust me, trust me a lot of people with.I said, no, one's paying attention. You've got to come in with like, I've got five customers. They all want this feature. This is how much money they want to spend. If they get this feature, we should prioritize this. Let's get this prioritize and because, okay, look, let's, let's do this. That regulation surpasses. Would open the doors to passing that fear. I w I used to work in investment banking and one of the lessons I learned leaving investment banking was there's only two things people really care about. And that's fear, fear, and greed fear, I think is greater than fair regulation was the grit and the grit of, of, of money.So I think that's the direction that would really help us out a lot is more regulation. This.Anne Currie: It would, it really would. I totally agree. Yeah, without it, life has been a lot more difficult than aftermath. I would say another technique, a tic technique that I used to use that to some effect, not, not to massive effect to someone like him with that. We didn't have any regulation. Apart from the threat, the threat of regulation is to find someone who is accidentally doing something really good.That right. And talk to them and say, do you know you're doing this thing? It's really, really good. Let me write it up is an amazing thing you were doing. And then they would go, oh yeah, we're doing this thing deliberately. And then they would let you, and then you would, they will talk at conferences about it.And they will say to that to everybody that this is something really care about that because they're not, they don't do any, there's no effort. But so once they're already doing it, they'll talk up what they're doing and then say, oh, this is something we would care about massively. And that's why we're doing it, but getting them to do it, it's impossible.Asim Hussain: Yeah. Yeah. So it's like someone who's already doing some work around or something that could, that is more efficient or it does reduce carbon. And I do. Thoughts as well. But then I like, for instance, for me, I get into the whole realms and it gets stuck in my head regarding these kinds of moral and ethical tech ethics.So this is the perfect person to talk to, but I'm like, this is going to be a, this will be quite a tangential conversation actually, because then where is greenwashing? Right? Greenwashing is a really challenging concept for me to wrap my head around because I work in a large enterprise organization. You know, it's kind of everything that you do has multiple vectors inside it, right?When someone's making a sustainability announcement. Yes. There are people involved who cap passionately about this space. There's also marketing people who, you know, they're getting measured on how many clicks and all this other stuff. So everybody's, it's this mixture of things that go into kind of announcements.Some of it is also just gonna be like, well, we can make money out of this as well. Like there's whole that aspect coming into that. But. Always upset of core people who care passionately about this and then figure out what, in order for this to be successful, we need to get marketing people interested in it.We need to get business people. Who's get the financial people in, in, in, in, in, on our side. And so what I always say is that there has to be that the initial intention. That's I think what Greenwood greenwashing is is, is when there's no initial intention to do good in the first place for me, that's, that's what I define as greenwashing.But then again, other people have told me, I may ask him, there are companies that really agree mushing and what you're on the other end of the whole spectrum to what we really mean is greenwashing. But anyway, yeah.Anne Currie: I think that's very, it's very hard to be active in this without constantly thinking about is what's the right thing to do when it wasn't. The other thing I do is I write a series of science fiction novels. I've just published book number seven. And the entire thing is, is like the question of. What's the right thing to do, you know, are you, is it can't, is it it's you have to be truthful all the time or is it Bentham?Is it utilitarian? If it, if it comes out on to on top, is it good? Even if the intentions were wrong or if the intentions were right, but some of the things that happened along the way until the line in order to make it happen, but it has a good effect. Is that right? Or is it wrong? It's very hard.Asim Hussain: It is. It's really hard. I bet we have enough.Anne Currie: Nobody has done.Asim Hussain: Yeah, I suppose they would have to have their internal answers. So for me, myself, I'm like, I, as long as the intention is, as long as my intention is good, I'm happy to speak to whoever I need to speak to and put whatever argument I need to spin on it to, to make it happen is, is, is the way I kind of view it.But Yeah.Anne Currie: So you, you are a follower of Jeremy Bentham,Asim Hussain: Is that a bit? Is that it's I utilitarianism,Anne Currie: Yeah, youAsim Hussain: the sound.Anne Currie: Emmanuel Kant truth at all costs.Asim Hussain: No. I'm not like an idealist like that. No, no, no, no, no failing whilst having a good feeling about myself. Isn't isn't for me is not, you know, so what that's just, that's actually ego. That's like your own ego, you know, I, I would argue your ego shouldn't matter in any of this. Yeah.Anne Currie: Yeah. It's, it's interesting. It is. It's not. Aye. Aye. Aye, aye. Also utilitarian, cause I want to Tappan, you know, and I, I, but at the same time I can see the argument that. Humans should be given all the information and allowed to make a free choice. But, but the reality is that they don't have all the information and they can't make a free choice.So, you know, it's what world do we live in? We live in a world where you're going to have to make an argument to your boss and, you know, cap Emmanuel Kant says, so is not a sufficiently convincing argument.Asim Hussain: I think that's the end of the day is, is, is it's all about convincing people, that's it? And that's all that your life has ever been about. It's about convincing people. Yeah. Anyway, get back back to topic, back to topic, back to topic. Yeah. So one of the things I found was, was, was, was, was regulation was one of the things that I, that really seem to open the doors.It didn't, I mean, until it until actually. I mean, some of the conversation I thought was the thought was interesting was that there is, there is a strong desire to, to be ahead of regulation, not to just respond to it so that there that is there. But I do think the world we're just not quite there just doesn't seem to be any regulation.That's just on the verge of like pushing for real change inside an organization. Yeah. I mean, what, I don't even know what some of that regulation would look like. I mean, a carbon tax would obviously be the main thing.Anne Currie: What makes Spain, Spain ready have variable electricity pricing. So. There's a lot of S that the sun is shining and the wind's blowing electricity is one hell of a lot cheaper than at times when it isn't. So that's, I think that's quite likely to come at some point, but will it be enough to change?Asim Hussain: Well, if it, I think going back to the original point of developer velocity is if that's all there is, I mean, how much of, I mean, one of the key challenges that we have you talk about, I talk about it is, you know, server utilization. I mean, if there's one, if there's one thing that you should work on inside an organization, which would have the biggest bang for your book, it's increasing your server utilization because most workloads for more.Organizations are running a very low levels of utilization, but when you and I, and I initially thought that just because I start having conversations with customers and people who have low utilizations, and I initially thought it was something along the lines of, oh, they just don't know. Um, oh, if I just, if I just explained to them, this is the situation, did you know, have you heard of auto scaling?Have you heard of auto scaling? Oh, this is wonderful thing. A lots of skeletons. But no, like the reasons for that there's many reasons for why they have chosen. They've chosen that path, but not, they're not fooled. Nobody knows what's going on. They've said, well, we're willing to live with the added expense of having quite a lot of our machines idle because of X, Y, and Z and X, Y, and Z have almost always got to do with money.Yes. We could go auto scaling. We could use as all the other methodologies, but you know, we've done it in the past and we lost three days worth of trading and that's social. It's not really worth it for us. We'd rather like live with the risk.Anne Currie: Yeah, yes. Which is why, again, I, I try to point people towards. Cloud managed services for that kind of stuff, because it's just too hard. You, you, you don't have the skills in your team. Almost everybody wants to, to go to zero ops these days. So the last thing they want to do is to give additional complexity to their ops teams.Asim Hussain: this is maybe this is what cause you, you and I have kind of had quite a few conversations in the past about how to actually cause at this, I think we're at the crux of. The challenge that we have. And I think we both agreed, this is, this is it. This is this, this log that we're trying to move this, this rock that we're trying to, to roll one of the ways that I've spoken about this and I've thought, Well, this is going bottom up.You know, uh, we need this to change. Maybe the solution is engaging with all of those, not just developers, the people who are in the business of building software, all their software teams. Making a priority for them so that it just kind of happens because some of my experience in the past and working in, in, in, in, in engineering organizations is you can always, if you want to try and get something done, you can usually go the official route, which is through the top and get it prioritized.And like all the other stuff, or you can just sideline have a bunch of conversations with the actual people building. And they're like, yeah, right. I'll just implement that tomorrow. You know, something along those lines. There's a lot of stuff that actually gets done. I think in the bottom up approach, I think you have a, more of a, a slight different thinking on the topic then if you want to.Anne Currie: Well, I would love to do it bottom up. And I, and I do agree with you that, well, there's been a lot of psychological thinking organizational thinking about how do you make changes in organizations? And because a lot of it came from changing the finance industry because it had to really change after that, after the big crash of 2008 and 2009, and they did loads and loads of psychological research and organizational psychological research.And what they found was that really. Uh, less middle managers decided to do it. It all stopped, you know, they would stop it going up and they stop it going down, which is where I think the tech conferences are very good because they tend to be attended by people in the middle managers, senior architects, if you can get them on board.Then that's all this really required. Top-down gets stopped by that bottom up, get stopped by them. So tech conferences are a good, a good place or, or, you know, magazine said th the register who is traditionally been a bit, a bit slow or pushing green and stuff. So they had no use, but that, that kind of level of folk are probably the people that we, that if we can convince we can change things.But I mean, if you look at Kubernetes, that's. Bottom-up thing to do. And I think it crazy to implement Kubernetes is unbelievably large amounts of work.Asim Hussain: so it's crazy to implementAnne Currie: Yeah. I think it'sAsim Hussain: Oh, wow.Anne Currie: amount of work. I would go to a manage service any day of the week before.Asim Hussain: Oh, I see what you're saying. So like a man is Kubernetes is kind of a containerized solution. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It doesn't stop people. I've heard people like I've walked into projects and I'm like, you you've implemented what by yourself? Yeah.Anne Currie: I know what I can see, what people used to and anybody over a certain age has written their own orchestrator in theAsim Hussain: well, it's fun. Isn't it? It's like you start on a project. You're like, I'll just get.Anne Currie: and necessary if he wants to have performance, you know, if you want something to stay up, you had to write some kind of orchestrates and to do that. But yeah. Can we as just a company.Asim Hussain: but is that maybe it may, maybe that's what it's all about because maybe it's certain types of decisions need to go middle, middle. And certain types of decisions in this space needs to go bottom up, because now what we're doing here is, is, is wide. This there's a wide variety of things you can do.Like choice of technology. People think happens higher up inside an organization. And I don't think it happens higher per second organization at all. I think it happens right in the trenches. I always see a leaders, rarely ever pick a technology, which that team is not already comfortable using in my experience. usually a lot of resistance if they're not, if you're picking a different technology, a lot of resistance. So maybe some of the, maybe it's like some of the leveraging, some of the open source technologies or some of the solutions, some of the more engineering type solutions should be bottom up.People can just pick them. We make them make those choices easier for people. But what kind of, what kind of areas could middle management help out within their space? Just measuring prioritization of issues or where money goes.Anne Currie: Well things like whether you're going to move to the cloud or you're going to be on.Asim Hussain: Yeah. Okay.Anne Currie: very much a middle management decision. That's not something that the young person is going to, that, that kind of level of change. Isn't isn't really going to happen.Asim Hussain: that's true. That's true. I get a lot of feedback from people who are kind of at the lower, early stages in their career. And the feedback to me, oftentimes for a lot of advice has been, this is all great, but there's nothing I can do. There's nothing I can do. Whereas middle management have more capability.Anne Currie: Yeah, but, but I think you have an interesting point, which is that there are, there are decisions. There are large-scale decisions. There are middle management. Which might be okay. Well, do you want to, actually, if you want to start measuring this stuff, do you want to move into the cloud? Do you want to adopt this new service?Uh, at a large scale, large scale, but there are also small level decisions, like, well, given your already in AWS or Azure, or do you want to use this service or this service, or do you want to use this open source tool or this open source tool? Because that kind of thing you do have change. You do have country.Asim Hussain: Just thinking about cloud. I think that is an easy one to think of, but yeah, one of them is like moving to the cloud, but I think it's not just moving to the cause. There's two aspects of moving to the cloud. There's one, which is the cloud is some, may be somewhat more efficient. Than where you are currently.And I'd say maybe It may be somewhat more efficient than weAnne Currie: It depends what servicesAsim Hussain: depends on services use. Yeah. I think we're having some conversations about this previously, but I think the, the great thing about cloud is it allows you. To architecture solutions in a way which increases your utilization. I think that is kind of like the fundamental crux of moving to the cloud.If you're not on the cloud, if you have your own private servers, you there's no point doing auto scaling because you're just, you have your own servers. What's the point you have to, you have to deal with your own headroom and the public cloud. Yes. It's more efficient. And B it gives you the, just the potential.Of of, of increasing utilization, but then it's moving to the managed services and that's when the conversation gets very, very tricky, because then you starting talking about a vendor, lock-inAnne Currie: Yeah.Asim Hussain: kinds of things. And I've had conversations with, with people, engineering, people who, who are in engineering organizations in kind of cloud providers.You like build those managed services and they're like, look, if somebody look, if you want to be more effective, You have to use vent in a vendor specific services because that they are, they are making it more like the, the, the Microsoft service is incredibly efficient because the Microsoft engineers are building it for Microsoft platform and the Microsoft system.But that's a Rudy for the longest time. That was the hardest sell in our space. It's like we are we trying to avoid.Anne Currie: I, I think I would embrace. I embrace lock-in. I think the only way you get efficiency is through locking. If you do lift and shift into the cloud, really, I can't see how you get any benefit from it whatsoever. I think I suspect much more expensive and not really any more efficient, marginally, more efficient.You have to use the service.Asim Hussain: Less efficient as well. Yeah. because you're, you're, you're moving from one paradigm to another paradigm and there are differences fundamentally in the cloud.Anne Currie: Yeah. Yeah. But the only thing that does is that once you have lifted and shifted, as you say, people are more likely to start comping off staff and using the managed services. So it's kind of a gateway drug lift and shift to the gateway drugAsim Hussain: get into the cloud wherever you can get into the cloud. And then, and then, but then like, but then why, but then we back to that same challenge that we have, which is why, like, what are the motivating factors to, to them? Implementing change. I mean, you knowAnne Currie: Well, it used to be the big lie of lifted shift would save you a load of money. The cloud was cheap.Asim Hussain: But then, but then even once you're in that, but w we need people to change and use more efficient services costs. Isn't a motivating factor by itself.Anne Currie: But I would say by far the most, the most effective argument for getting people to use Monett managed services is zero ops. No ops. That, that, if you can say you could get rid of all of those, you know, you know, all those people in ops that you really don't like.Because I have to say, I mean, I say I love ops people. I love well, because I'mAsim Hussain: I love it. This is let's just make sureAnne Currie: I took, I love off street mall, but most of the rest of the business always found them quite challenging.Asim Hussain: Yeah. I actually started off my whole career. It's actually, now that I think about it. Yeah. So they go to SIS admin, we call CISAnne Currie: Well, you were very tool guy, people who are very tall, tend to, I find that it's opposite. It's full of people who quite tall. I think probably because in the old days you could lift machines around,Asim Hussain: Yeah.Anne Currie: never found any girls in all, because we all just went, can't lift thisAsim Hussain: Yeah, that's hard. Jars are so heavy and was bringing them up from, from four inches off the floor to eight inch. Oh, it was so hard.Anne Currie: That's why there were no women.Asim Hussain: They're all womenAnne Currie: And the cloud enabled women to answer ops because there's nothing to liftAsim Hussain: It was literally lifted and shifted in,Anne Currie: and deed. It was literally lift and shift, but yeah.Asim Hussain: I forgot what we're talking about.Anne Currie: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, how do you persuade people to the managed services? I think it's really all about look, you know, cause you don't have to fire, so you might want to fire ops people, but you don't have to fire ups people. You can, you can use them for develop the dev ops.You can use them in fear of. And, and whoever is at your managed services or AWS managed services or Google managed services will do some of their work for them. And, and, and that's really, and then at the same time, you need to push Google as your AWS to make those services more green. So that at the same time, you're pushing that developer productivity by a backdoor.You're also upping their green side of things that was more kind of Fairfield.Asim Hussain: When you, what you're really saying is you're upping the ops productivity by dividing by a fewer number of numbers until you've reached zero. Which mathematically doesn't work anyway. So you're basically saying, is this the same argument you're saying like, we're going to increase your ops productivity.We're going to increase as you're increasing your developer velocity. Like if you use a managed service, you increase the developer velocity. So basically it's, it's, it's it's, that seems to be one argument from our conversation. And it's the only argument that is of any importance ever in any developer situation, which is a developer productivity.Anne Currie: Yeah.Asim Hussain: And I felt that my felt, because I felt, I remember in my early years of my career, I've been in this space for 20, 20 odd years now. Yes. I graduated in the.com boom. So I was very lucky to get a job, uh, for university. That's just like, you have a job. And I even at that point, if you valuable to do things. And I, and I remember, I know there's been certain points throughout my career. It wasn't because it happened so slowly. It wasn't like one day something over so slowly. I was like, it just doesn't seem to be that important that I write anything efficiently anymore. And then, you know, I started off in C plus plus, and it just got less and less and less supported.And in fact, my earlier the career was doing. now, I don't know what to call it now is great. Regionally grid computing. So high-performance computing. So like being very, very like super efficient servers were still pretty expensive in those days. So there was like, it was worthwhile investing some time from an ask him to make your code more efficient because the actual server costs would, would like don't micro save on the servers would like be less than an asset.But now for some reason, it doesn't, it doesn't that that equation doesn't doesn't relate anymore. Is it? I think a, you know, our costs have skyrocketed, you know, B S cloud costs have gone down, but as a Jevons paradox argument, isn't it Cod costs have gone down. But also I think that there's also this kind of opportunity cost thing, which is what is this it's it's triggering.The fear is that we could spend, we could spend an asset making it more efficient, or we could spend an asset in building another feature to be our competition.Anne Currie: Yeah.And it's, it's not just that. I think it's the, those, those complex languages. They, they were quite, it was quite, quite slow to develop.Asim Hussain: mm.Anne Currie: it just, yeah, it, now everybody wants it, this small thing out, out, out, out, out to see what happens and to be more interesting. And so bull Paul is dead. Most of these two work quite well with, with CNC plus plus, and yeah, nobody wants to do it cause I, I, there, you know, the dirty secrets of agile is it is not more efficient than waterfall.If you can, if you can get all to full rights, if you, if you really have a clear idea about what you're doing. You can do it with quite a small number of engineers, quite cheaply. It takes you a long time and you don't get to any iteration on that. So if you were right first time, then great. If you've got it wrong from the start you're screwed.Asim Hussain: I think agile, like if with waterfall, if you, if you, if you know what you're doing, if you know what you want to build, it works. Agile is like, I don't really know.Anne Currie: HmmAsim Hussain: We're just responding to like requests, like trying to agile when you don't have a bunch of customer requests coming in as is doesn't really work.I don't think. Yeah. w we've been quite negative. I think someone listening to this podcast might just like, Table flip and give up. I don't really know. Look, they want to ask what are the successes that we'veAnne Currie: The huge success. And there was an you and I both know that we did not necessarily see this coming was for the big three cloud providers to all commit to carbon zero operations by 2030 in 2020. We, because we've been pushing, I'm sure we'd both been pushing for this for a long time. Not really expecting it to happen.And then suddenly. And that sets, that sets the timeline for everybody that says, look 2030, I expect your, your app, your applications, to be able to run carbon zero, which means. It's something that's that, that, that we need to discuss. What does, what does that mean? Does that mean that basically 90% of your CPU load is on carbon-free electricity and you can 10% maybe, maybe no more than that is running at times when this get, it has to be on fossil fuels.Asim Hussain: I think my definition is a lot stricter, which means that it's it's it's it's it. I don't know how they're going to do it. My definition is like super strict. And what I do know is like, I think you're absolutely right. Like they, they, they, that that's been a wonderful success. The fact that the major cloud providers have not only committed to that, but also they provided the vault now very, very new, shorter provided measurement tools, you know, which is very, very impressive.What's interesting about that is that every to achieve that goal every single year, you need to make incremental improvements and you know, all the low-hanging fruits. So, like, I won't say like, people are like really thinking extremely hard, you know, next year, you know, we, we committed to this, what, what do we need to do now to make that happen?And the wonderful things about public commitments is that they're public.Anne Currie: Yeah.Asim Hussain: like, you're like, I don't want to make it out. I don't want to, I don't want to say we failed is a big driving, driving factor for that. So, Yeah.So that's been a big success.Anne Currie: Th that there was, there was a really interesting paper from Goebel. I know that you've read this paper, the paper from. In June last year saying, okay, how will the hell are we going to do this? But they say, we CA they can know how to do this on their own workloads. They look, and they can do it on the word workloads by introducing more time shifting, but the public cloud, because it's all black boxes to them.But then really that, what you're saying then is you need instance types, the main things that aren't, aren't that things aren't black boxes anymore. So.Asim Hussain: Price signals.Anne Currie: it, yes. I'd say sports instances, instances with some degree of SLA, which is not quite as, as on demand, as you know, let's get rid of those on demand service and the lift and shift and move everything over towards containers.Whether look, you know, I'll, I'll run it within 10 minutes, but I'm not going to run it within 10 seconds.Asim Hussain: Yeah, but they also have to like, cause I mean it's for a net zero target by 2050, they have to have eliminated 90% of the image. And that's in a world where we've probably quadrupled 10 times grown by 20, 20, 20 50. And so that kind of like, yeah. Yeah. So yeah, you're right. Setting. Those kinds of targets is, is really, really important.And I, and I was going to say like, one of the things that I've seen successes internally is soon as soon as your organization sets a target that helps you and proposing prep pre. Why would they need this whole grace and favor? Once you've got a target, then you can say, well, Hey, you know, you're that target you set, but you're starting to lose a little bit of hair over because you're going to like have to, well, if we were to do X, it can maybe meet, not 0.2% of your target, whatever, you know, and if enough people do that, that's enough.So I think that's kind of you're right. Those companies setting targets is one of the big things is one of the big things. And, and, and I think that's one of the first steps. If you, if you, if you work in an organization that hasn't set a target. Forget about trying to push any green software work. Your first job is to, is to advocate internally and do what you need to do to get your company to set target.Anne Currie: Yeah. And, and set a target for a long enough distance in the future that all the executives think they'll have left by thenAsim Hussain: because you're right.Anne Currie: managers know they might be around that's where middle managers who I'm good. So they tend to be here in 10 years. I'm going to have to meet that target. That's why middle managers stop things happening.Asim Hussain: Oh, I love, I just, I just got your point because if they're going to be leaving, then they're willing to set a target as someone else has to. Yeah, yeah,Anne Currie: the cuteness of setting the target without any of the pain of meeting the target.Asim Hussain: a, It's like a musical Chaz, like whoever's, who's the CEO left of the table when they've got to get to get to zero. Yeah, absolutely.Absolutely. So I think, I think, I think those, those bold aggressive targets and kind of any, any internal advocacy you can get to kind of push those targets, upwards is, is, is, is one of the big thing, big successes, I think like, well, I have seen a lot of, I've seen a big sea change since January last year, a big change in the number of.People customers, people just, just asking about this question, which is like, Hey, I've got this software. Like, what do I do to make it greener? Like, just asking that question is, is, has been coming up a lot and that's going to that's one of the things we've been trying to do in the foundation is just try and get some answers together for that.You know, what is the advice that people have for that? So I am incredibly infused over the last, because I've been in the space of craft for years as well in the first couple of years. What do I have to do? The last, the last year has been very, very exciting because of all the other, you know, it felt like vindicates and validated.A lot of other people who care about this, I'm asking those right questions. There's been a lot of interest in that space. I just don't think we have a lot of great answers yet workingAnne Currie: It's an interesting gods. In some ways we dealt once, once today's questions. Cause we want people to ask those questions of their providers. So that they know that there is interest. We want people to be saying, how do I do this? Where is my green region? How, what's your plan for making the regional I'm already hosting in green.Asim Hussain: but then they're all competent, but then everybody's joining the foundation and going, well now let's, now let's figure out the answers to these questions. So I think that's that, that, that, that's what Sonos, and I think kind of one of the things I, I found one of the most impactful things that I've personally done and I you've done it as well.And a lot of people have done it is. Talking about this stuff is educating teaching, training, making people aware of it, making people. I remember I was speaking at a conference. I won't say where I was speaking at a conference last late last year. And it was, it wasn't like a tech conference was more general purpose sustainability conference.And there were a bunch of people giving talks and I gave my talk and the feedback I got afterwards is people coming up to me going, wow, you know, you're the first person who's talking about solutions. Everybody else is talking about, you know, oh wait, where we're all death destruction. It's all doing the problems much worse than we think.And I'm like, well, I don't have time for that anymore. It's this? I've heard it all before. Well, the solution is like, what are the things? And I think that's kind of where we are. We're in that even what you just described right now, like we're talking to cloud providers, that's one solution and we're now we're kind of talking about other ones, like finding other solutions and just talking about it. Yeah.Anne Currie: Yeah. And decide. We'd love to know, have to decide to, to act and they have to act. So, you know, we, we. Making sure they know, but we also have to pitch the no in a way that they will decide to act. So if you say, Ooh, you need to know about this. It's going to cost you a fortune and it's going to reduce your developer productivity.They will not decide to act. So you need to frame it in a way that they'll go, okay. Well that sounds doable. I could decide to act on that.Asim Hussain: Yeah.Anne Currie: So that's the next thing is. Um, how do we make it? So it doesn't acting doesn't immediately blow away all our, actually that thing, the metrics that they're actually already measured on.Asim Hussain: Yeah. And I think that that might be how we, how we end this podcast, like with like a question, uh, relevant, but yeah, that's been a really refund chat, I should say. And I hope, I don't know if it's, I don't know how useful this, this conversation is to other people, but I found out a lot of fun.Anne Currie: What was I was, I think that was good. I think it was good.Asim Hussain: Okay.Wonderful. So, thanks for listening to Environment Variables, all the resources for this podcast, including links to our guests and more about, well, the topics that we discussed as well as the Green Software Foundation are in the show description below. We hope you enjoyed the show and see you on the next one.Hey everyone. Thanks for listening. Just a reminder to follow Environment Variables on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please do leave a rating and review. If you like what we're doing, it helps other people discover the show. And of course we want more listeners to find out more about the Green Software Foundation. Please visit greensoftware.foundation . Thanks again, and see you in the next show.

In this episode Asim Hussain is joined by guests Scott Chamberlin formerly of Microsoft and Henry Richardson of Watttime as they discuss how time-shifting, location-shifting, curtailment and other terms are important to Carbon Aware Computing. How can we build sustainable software that reduces the impact on the environment and how these decisions may just lie in the hands of the developers instead of the CSR teams.  Learn more about our guests:Scott Chamberlin: LinkedInAsim Hussain: LinkedIn / Twitter Henry Richardson: LinkedIn / Website Episode resources:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter Green Software Foundation SummitMagazine: Branch MagazineIf you enjoyed this episode then please either:Follow, rate, and review on Apple PodcastsFollow and rate on SpotifyConnect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!TRANSCRIPT BELOW:Asim Hussain: And one way I think about carbon awareness is actually I'm building software, which responds to natural cycles of the earth. And it connects me with nature in an indirect way, but it's one of the few ways you can connect with nature. I think in software. Hello and welcome to environment variables brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discuss the latest news and events surrounding green software. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software. I'm your host, Asim Hussain, welcome to the Environment Variables Podcast.We have an exciting episode today talking about carbon aware computing.Scott Chamberlin: Hi, I'm Scott Chamberlain. I was previously at Microsoft leading some of the sustainability efforts in the windows organization. And the day, this podcast is airing. I'm actually starting a new role at Intel leading their software sustainability effort.Henry Richardson: And I'm Henry Richardson. With Wattime we're a nonprofit really focused on making grid emissions, available to partners to achieve impact through load flexibility of sighting of renewables. And so we're really excited about the kind of expansion of capabilities in software to take advantage of flexibility in grid emissions.Asim Hussain: Henry cause this, this, this is your, this is your bread and butter. This is your space. Do you think you can give a, go trying to explain, you know, carbon intensity in these concepts to the audience here.Henry Richardson: Absolutely. One of the things that we spend a lot of time thinking about is how. Clean or dirty that the electric grid is. And what we mean by that is when you make a change on the electric grid by increasing or decreasing load, how does emissions change? So if you decide to schedule a compute load at a specific hour, a certain set of power plants will be responding to that change in load and they'll have an associated emissions.And so you can see how by scheduling. Load updates or sorry, windows updates to specific times you could actually affect which power plants are operating. Ideally, we would be scheduling those two when there's excess solar, excess wind, which can happen pretty often in the great Plains. There's a lot of excess wind, a lot of excess solar in California, but you can also pick between coal and natural gas, if you can have that flexibility.So. We measure the intensity, the electric grid, and then we make that information available the software and making it available to software as what we consider carbon awareness. So can the software take advantage of that? The time varying emissions, intensity of the electric grid and actually change when it trains machine learning loads, as Scott was saying updates, major pieces of software, can you run.At different times because they're, they're run chronically or regular. So things like that. So we see lots of opportunities in software to be kind of carbon aware and take advantage of this, this flexible.Asim Hussain: Yeah, I think there's lots of other examples. I mean, there's, there's other big, big examples of well as well from other organizations, but where they started to apply the ideas relate to, to a carbon Alanise I think broadly, it, it, if you have the kind of. Software workload, which can respond to a signal, not all software can, that's the chatter challenge.Not all software can respond like this, but if you do have the kind of workload that can respond like this, and that's why the windows update is such a perfect type of workload, because it's something that, you know, you need to do at some point. But you can have a reasonable amount of flexibility over when, when that happens.If you're, if you're, if I'm visiting a webpage, I don't have that. You know, I need that web. And in three seconds, the other kind of famous use case I've seen is a large, large scale implementation of this I've seen is, is the work that Google's done with their carbon way data centers, which I think is quite an interesting, like the work that Microsoft's done with the windows is, is, is, is on a device.And then Scott you've told me before I keep on saying, I'm sure I get the number wrong. Is it 10 billion devices around the world? Use windows? Is it? What is it?Scott Chamberlin: think the last public number is either 1.4, 1.5 billion devices use windmill point for 1.5 billion client devices use windows, and then there's a separate, separate staff for our servers and data. Asim Hussain: Well, so there's a, quite a few people in the world who now think is 10 billion, because I just threw that stat out so many times in the past, one of the things you're involved with at your time at Microsoft Scott was well windows, but specifically, and then an announcement that windows made recently.Do you want to give a quick summary as to what that was.Scott Chamberlin: sure. Totally. And again, this is in partnership. Wattime and Henry's organization as us in partnership with electricity map and the tomorrow organization. One of the first things that we did in windows was figure out how do we bring carbon awareness into the. Operating system, right? The operating system is responsible for scheduling tasks.One of the things that does, and the question we had was if we had a CO2 intensity signal, could we number one? Change the behavior of the operating system in a way that was beneficial for the environment and had minimal user impact. And number two, would that have a significant impact in the emissions associated with the energy used by PCs around the world?It was a PC focused saying not necessarily a server or a data center focus thing. I'm still, yeah. Recently in preview, Microsoft released the. First implementation of carbon aware, scheduling for windows update. And so windows update is essentially how windows applies new features for users. And there's this whole set of criteria which go into when is the optimal time to apply an update for a couple reasons.Number one, in a lot of cases. It causes a reboot to happen on your machine, not all cases. And in some other cases, it requires CPU cycles requires a bunch of things to happen, perhaps to close that kind of stuff. So we added to that list of criteria, carbon awareness. And so if we can, you know, with this within a certain timeframe, Find a period of the day where we think that the CO2 intensity and the grade is going to be lower.We're going to try to do the update during that time, rather than at a time of day, which might be optimal from the other criteria, point of view, but might have higher suit to intensity. So that's. Feature, that's just been released to windows preview. And in an upcoming version of windows 11 is available to windows insiders, not available to the general windows population yet.And they're doing evaluation and testing of, of that feature at this point, that's the ability to shift across the time of day, which we would call time shifting. And then there's the ability to just shift appropriate workloads. Yeah. To the place where it's being run and that's what we would call it.Location shifting right. In, in the, and there's two, I think, critical challenges with each, right? In, in time shifting, you have to have some ability to be able to move the load to a different period of time. And that's where you were kind of referring out. Some is like, Hey, when I'm using a webpage, I can't really move the processing of that visit to a different time of day.So. When you, and you have to be able to sometimes predict when that is, because you have to, a lot of times you're scheduling into, you're always scheduling into the future, but you don't always have. Long period of time to look forward and wait for a real time signal. So sometimes you have to prep your workload and predict when that is.There's some interesting ML and AI stuff that while time invest in to predict when that period would be, so you can get ready, your load can get ready and do it at that time. And, and that's one thing that is really important for time shifting now, location shifting. It also has to be appropriate workload, but in a different sense, many compute workload.Art require huge amounts of data to be able to read in and data shifting is really hard. It's actually probably a it's something that would block a really large scale location shifting implementation. If you had a huge large data dependency on that. So things like training machine learning algorithms are pretty hard to.Location shift. If you're not already geo distributing your data to multiple data centers around the world. And many people are, you know, I'm sure Google in a lot of senses, geo distributing their data to many data centers around the world. And then they shift to, they could, I don't know what they're doing.They could shift their. Processing to those, you know, regional locations, which had lower carbon intensity at the appropriate period of time and, you know, say follow the sun or follow the wind around the world. As long as the data was already there.Henry Richardson: And that doesn't speak to the political challenges of shifting data, which is like, you might have different jurisdictions, like you have specific rules and won't let the data outside of the boundaries. So they're not only technical challenges, but also geopolitical challenges. I would say.Scott Chamberlin: Totally agree Henry. Yeah. Asim Hussain: Every time you try and have this conversation with anybody about location. Shifting that's the, the word data sovereignty just comes up almost immediately in the conversation and it's challenging. But then again, like within large countries, like the United States, there is still a lot of variability between east coast and west coast.And the date, I believe the United States is one data sovereignty region and the same thing can, is it not? Um, she's shaking her head, Scott.Scott Chamberlin: A lot of the data sovereignty laws, the privacy laws are being written by the States, today as though like say Illinois has a really strong one in California is really strong. it depends on the nature of the data, whether it actually falls within that data, sovereignty law, not all data is going to, there's a lot of data that's just generic and is not tied to individual privacy stuff.And so that certainly wouldn't apply, but when you're doing, you know, Machine learning or algorithmics, or, you know, big data processing on things that are associated with users or have data privacy policies associated with their collection and use. yeah.there's going to be even in the United States, a lot of times per state laws, you would have to comply by.So again, it depends on the nature of the data about exactly. You have to consider when thinking about these kinds of things, there's a lot of things like in processing, you know, batch processing, a lot of these cloud concepts there start when you, when you think of a cloud native, you know, world, right.There's a tons of cloud concepts that are really appropriate for. Both time shift and location shifting, you know, in NLS to me, you did a lot of work on, on batch processing. You know, there's the, the work that has been done both in Google and Microsoft on, on cargo or Kubernetes, like how do you build it into the infrastructure so that if you do have appropriate data, you can start to have the data center operating in a carbon aware way and that's, that's analogous, you know, like We in windows, On the client and data center, you have similar concepts, but are more operating on those cloud data workloads, which are very different than what the client workloads are like.So.Henry Richardson: We focused on a lot on the challenges. We were just surprised by seeing, by seeing how many people are actually figuring out how to navigate a lot of those. Like maybe they identified instead of, because data can be so. Maybe they identify two data centers that are in different regions and just have local copies of both of those so that they can pick when they train.So they're not picking amongst the entire set of data centers, but a specific set or like the windows opportunity. I, would've never thought of updates as an opportunity for flexibility, but it's a huge, like you have up to a week of flexibility. Whereas a lot of the conversations we have are like, we need this job to be done by the morning.We only have. 12 hours of flexibility, but so the more flexibility you have, the more savings potential you can achieve. So I think we talked to a lot of creative engineers who have identified opportunities within their very specific software to figure out how to make it.Asim Hussain: And I think that's one of the exciting things about this space is that there's just a lack of knowledge. And this is kinda one of the things I believe for a while is if you pass on this knowledge to people, I mean, hopefully some people listen to this podcast now, or then have an idea regarding some aspects of their workload or something that they can maybe explore with, with carbon where computing one of the things I've always, there's always been a lot of interests.You know, one of the things we do in the green software like movement is we, as you look at kind of various, you know, as you know, various touchpoints to reduce the emissions of software and carbon awareness is just one of them. There's always been a lot of interests. The interest comes from the fact that relative to the investment, the return is quite high.It's not, this is not going to be the solution, the one solution and organization adopts to, to, to reduce all of their emissions. But relative to the investment you've got to put in, you know, the return is quite high. I think I've seen those even that there was a paper recently. I'm not too sure. Much adheres to what I've heard from people I know in this space, but it's talks about an upwards of up to about 30% emissions reductions from workloads.Although I've heard kind of at a top start more about 10%. I don't know how kind of, what are your, have you, have you guys heard anything about this, about the potential improvements from, from the.Scott Chamberlin: I think, well, I can't really reference the Microsoft saving specifically. I don't think they've released that information. I think what you can say is that it's highly dependent on the parameters of your problem. You're trying to solve like Kendra is referencing in terms of the amount of timeframe you have to be able to shift, or the amount of locations you have to choose from, for shifting and what the marginal emissions are in those locations.Right? Like shifting from you know, coal to natural gas might have a certain percentage opportunities shifting from coal to. You know, a hundred percent renewable, like wind or solar is going to have a much different, and if you can completely shift or partially shift, you're going to have a bunch of different stuff.I think almost every implementation is going to have a different upper bound at what the savings is and, you know, getting good at measuring that and identifying what that is, I think is if you were to like break down, if somebody's thinking. Building some time shifting or some locations shifting carbon awareness into their application.Certainly in the number, one thing that any user, any developer would need to do is model their potential parameters that they're going to be con they're going to constrain their problem. You know, come up with some estimates. Like if I can S if I can move 5% of my workload within 24 hours in DC location.I have this much potential savings. And then going back to ask them your previous point about the potential, like the cost versus benefit and the modeling, the work like there's, it costs this much development work to be able to do that versus this much savings and any developers are going to need to do.Like modeling and that estimation before they go forward with an implementation, because I can certainly think of many problems, which might not benefit greatly, especially if they already are very small and the amount of emissions they're generating and it might not be worth the implementation for that.You might focus on other things, but there's certainly ones that are, you know, generating a lot of missions. The, the attributes necessary, like the flexibility and time or location, the.data dependency stuff we've already discussed. There's certainly problems that could. Great benefits in terms of implementation time shifting.But again, the prereq for all of this is To model that out, understand what that potential is before implementing. And then if I can, I want to talk about one of the things you mentioned asked them in terms of the cost is a benefit. I think you're totally right. Like I, you know, in other places as some, I'm just, you haven't mentioned here, but you talk about software sustainability.The first, if you were to like, create a. A classification of software sustainable, and you've done this previously and I've seen it. And the first branch and that is, you know, making carbon efficient applications. And then the other branch is making carbon aware applications. Right. And so those of us who are new to software sustainability might think of.Efficient applications in the past, we might've talked about this performance engineering or improving the efficiency of your algorithms or stuff like that. Almost all of that is really hard. If it was easy, people have Buddha probably have done it already. Right. The nice thing about carbon awareness is that it's a different.Way of thinking about your algorithms that are already running and it doesn't necessarily require you to reengineer your algorithms or to change the underlying. Implementation of your software. You're instead changing the scheduling about how that, how those underlying things work. And yes, I totally agree with you.Like from a concert has been at Fort point of view in a lot of cases, the low-hanging fruit is in carbon awareness and software that I've seen.Henry Richardson: To kind of build on that. Once you've identified a piece of software that could have flexibility, both spatially or temporally there kind of tend to be two big factors that drive the potential one is how variable is the, is the location that you're in. So is there a lot of variability in the admissions rate?And can you take advantage of that with your flexibility and then comparing across regions? But then the second piece is how capable are you a forecasting that variability, because then, you know, can you take advantage of that variability by scheduling it? So do you have 24, 72 hour week long forecasts that you can begin to say, how well does that forecast match?What's actually going on and can I take, can I use that forecast actually think about when to schedule? So the first step is really saying, what software do I have that can take advantage of flexibility? And then the next section is. Once I had that flexibility, is there an opportunity to actually reduce emissions with that flexibility?So you need both of those pieces to really, to be successful. Scott Chamberlin: Yeah. And Henry, so, you know Wattime provides a forecast, correct me if I'm wrong, it's up to about 24 hours. Right. And Henry Richardson: We just extended it to 72, but yes. Scott Chamberlin: great. And do you have any stats that say how they speak to the accuracy of the forecast over certain periods of time and. Time parents start to be really unpredictable and it is, it like correlated with whether it is correlated with a bunch of other stuff.That's becomes more unpredictable. The further out you look, you look Henry Richardson: Yeah, that's a, that's a really interesting question. We we've shifted away from an accuracy metric towards an efficacy. So, if you were to shift based on this signal or this forecast, the signal, how effective are you at reducing emissions? Scott Chamberlin: okay. Henry Richardson: And so if we get the magnitude a little bit wrong, but we get the rank order or the, the, the, the time, right.That's much more important than the absolute magnitude, but that's just a training trick that we use on our backend, but it kind of can be represented as accuracy as well. But to answer your more, the deeper question of like, what characteristics do we see? We see that like solar dominated regions tend to.Slightly easier to predict because solar is much more reliable when the sun's up. And if you have cloud cover, you'll be reasonably okay. When can be much more unpredictable. So wind dominated regions tend to have variability. That's hard to detect far ahead, but we might be say, we think that this hour is likely to have curtailment.We might not know the exact five minute period when we're throwing away wind, but generally we can shift load to. The periods that are much more likely to see that high variability or low emissions period.Asim Hussain: You just used the word curtailment and I feel like we need to educate people as to that's what that magic.Henry Richardson: Yes. It's a very jargony, I apologize, but in the industry we often refer to when we throw away wind and solar, because there's an excess of it or where there's not enough capacity in the transmission system to, to move that wind or solar to other places as curtailment. And we're starting to see. Certain grids throw away wind and solar at kind of pretty prodigious rates.California throws away quite a bit of it in the spring because there's an oversupply of solar because the sun is shining, but it's high temperatures haven't arrived yet. So we're not running air conditioning also in the great Plains. There can be a lot of wind at night, but low load periods. So there's an excess of wind, I believe even in the Pacific Northwest occasion.In the spring that the same low load situation, when there's lots of wind and solar, they'll actually spill hydro over the dams and not generate with it because they have to release it. So you can see how, like, if we can take advantage of these opportunities through load flexibility with software, that's, that's an amazing opportunity.We also talk about devices often, too. So smart devices, EVs, that type of thing can anything that has load flexibility. We're very focused on software in this conversation, but you can see how it could be other things. Scott Chamberlin: Right. And again, I think I was thinking about that very concept Henry, in terms of, you know, you have to think about software in a very broad sense. When you talk about the total opportunity here for only talking about PC software, the total opportunity is, you know, going to be limited by the number of.PC's in the world as, you know, windows devices, Mac devices, you know, and throw in, obviously, you know, the mobile devices in the world, which kind of sip power, but, you know, we all need to think about the broader definition of software it's software running, you know, in our thermostats, even though it's driving, you know, Both, you know, energy, if you're, uh, you know, electric heat or electric heat pumps and stuff like that, or natural gas use, which doesn't have the same benefit of the time shifting, but it's software, that's running like, you know, you, my robot vacuum cleaner, that's sitting right here.It's software, that's running, you know, almost everything, you know, Future how homes and businesses are being controlled by software and have differing abilities to take advantage of the topics of carbon awareness that we're talking about. Right. And so, you know, the IOT space is huge relative to the PC space.When we typically think about when we think about software or the cloud space, when we think about the Microsoft software, but those are all software developers and they all. It a lot of sense have connected, you know, internet connections and can take advantage of some of these signals. And, you know, I think another area that, you know, we, we talked about, I don't have the ability to talk about too much, but we need to think about what, how does this take advantage of disconnected environments?Not every, not every phone is connected at all times to the internet. And can you still do carbon awareness when you're disconnected? I think there's a lot of work to be done there. A huge impact or not. I don't know, but some of the modeling and stuff like that, it has seasonal variability as well, which might be able to be built in as a baseline.If you don't have, you know, rich live internet connections on at all times. Henry Richardson: We've had some conversations with our partners. Like what about fall back schedules or. That's still to still do some scheduling that can maybe not perfectly identify that variability, but can still take advantage of some of the grid emissions, variability. And we've also had conversations around like how frequently should that device be connecting to the, to the kind of grid emission signal and making decisions based on that, because that has a, a carbon penalty to it as well.Because every time you reach out, run the computation to decide when to schedule load, there's a, there's a carbon cost to that. And are you, you have to make it. The flexibility is achieving savings greater than the cost. Scott Chamberlin: Yeah, we ran into and out of a feature, another feature, I won't name the feature, but we did investigate a machine learning, you know, approach to reducing, you know, matter of power, use a windows. It turned out in that case. The amount of processing and power used for the processing to run the algorithm was greater than the potential savings for it.So, yeah, you're touching on a really great point. Then that goes back to the point I was trying to make in terms of, you got to model all of this, but yeah, Henry, you totally got a model. The. New stuff you're writing as well to make sure you're not, you know, stripping out all the potential savings by the new code.You're going to start running here. And hopefully you're looking at loads that are large enough that, you know, the amount of algorithmics and. You know, connections and, And services you need to ride to do time awareness is probably going to be much, much smaller for an appropriate workload that you're looking at.But again, that's where the modeling and the measurement is super important to be in with.Henry Richardson: And we've seen people scale that level. Like if it's a small workload, they'll just pull the forecast once, make a decision and then not check it. Or they can even do it every like three hours instead of every 15 minutes or something like that. So there's lots of ways of like adjusting the workload to the, to the job.Asim Hussain: One thing I wanted to cover. I think, I think it's quite interesting to also cover the future because one of the things I think Henry you've mentioned to me and I think is quite important, is that everything that we're doing today, like if you talk about modeling something today, That's today's impact yet.The world is actually when we're moving towards a future where more and more of the energy is coming from renewables. And therefore the impacts. If you were to build something today where your carbon, where workload has an impact of 10% in five years’ time, it might have an impact of 20% because the world's becoming kind of a lot more variable.I mean, do you have any estimates of how that's, how that's gonna go in the future?Henry Richardson: We definitely are seeing an acceleration of renewable deployment, which is increasing the variability of grids. I mean, historically. The electric utility is balancing authorities. Grid operators have always matched generation to demand. And I think we're shifting into a paradigm where we're going to have to be matching more of the demand to the variable generation coming from wind and solar.And so as that variability increases, we're just seeing kind of dramatic increases in curtailment. Renewable deployment that enabled just much greater savings. You're kind of shifting from a world where you're occasionally trying to pick up that excess renewables to a world where you're trying to avoid the peaking fossil plants, which is just a much greater opportunity from an emission savings span, where you just move a load as far away from the peaks, instead of trying to find those trucks.Asim Hussain: Can we just dig into that for a second? Cause I think that's quite, that's quite interesting because that's almost the opposite of curtailment because you, are you talking about peaker plants? They're so.Henry Richardson: Exactly. So you could have a hundred percent renewable all the time, except for occasional periods where they have to turn on those really dirty peaker plants, whether they're fossil oil, fossil oil, fossil gas, or fossil coal, as you just want to avoid those periods at all costs. Instead of right now, we're saying that seeing occasional periods.Where we're throwing away renewables, and you want to move as much load into those. So it's kind of like this expansion of opportunity, which is really.Asim Hussain: Because because those, my understanding those peaker plants is, you know, the grids need the capability. The energy very, very, very fast. And they tend to be natural gas don't or some sort of gas. Cause you can just burn that quickly interrupted workloads, I think is what it is. It's interrupting. So not running something for five minutes could be as valuable as shifting your workload to another hour because you're avoiding the worst emissions.Henry Richardson: Absolutely. And of course you want longer periods, the more flexible. Great of that opportunity. So there could be a two hour period in the afternoon where they have to bring those peakers on. And if you can avoid that, that can be really good. Scott Chamberlin: But, but talking to this variability, one question that comes up pretty frequently is the nature of different grids and the makeup. And especially when it comes to grids that are. Are more towards the grids. We're going to need say 30 years from now, which a lot of times, you know, has the peak and Henry you're more of an expert on this.So, correct me if I'm wrong that the peak loads are going to be handled by in some of these. Nuclear. I think I take long-term ideally in some cases, and then the base load is going to be, you know, renewables for the most part. And so in those grids, you know, I, when I think of a couple regions today that we deal with Iceland, you know, typically we treat it mostly a hundred percent renewables.France is another one because it has high investment nuclear. We kind of treat this hundred percent. Carp R zero carbon region. And again, Henry, you have to correct me. I'm wrong, those two regions, but it's because they have this nuclear renewable, you know, not the nuclear in Iceland, but in France, high Metro renewable.And in that case, the carbon awareness is just kind of a flat clean signal. And so as the grid evolves to these things that are like zero carbon grids, like the techniques we're talking about, they don't have as much impact. Henry Richardson: So, this is a really interesting disconnect that we're seeing right now. And especially in the near future load, flexibility will have a lot of emissions savings potential because it'll be able to shift out of those dirty periods into the curtailment periods. But once we eventually attain those a hundred percent or near a hundred percent clean grids, the flexibility won't be saving emissions directly, but it will be enabling a hundred percent clean grid because will be following wind and.And if we didn't have that flexibility, we would have to be fossil resources. So like it's an essential piece of a clean future grid, but it's going to be harder to quantify the benefit of it in that view. Scott Chamberlin: That's a great way of putting it Henry it's it's we get to clean grids faster. The more we have carbon awareness because carbon Alinea, or this allows us to maximize the use of our renewables. Whereas today we're already curtailing them. Right. I think that's, that's an excellent way of putting that. Henry Richardson: Exactly. And so it's, it's like a critical piece of that future grid without it. We wouldn't be able to obtain it as quickly as efficiently as, as chief.Asim Hussain: It makes me realize I had like a, an epiphany moment a year or so ago when I, I realized the way this is interesting in computing, but just generally the way we consume electricity. Is based upon the way the energy grid was created. Like a lot of other things we do in our life, we flex based off of what's going outside in the world.Like, I, I don't try and grow plants in winter and my garden because it's cold. Right? So we, we normally have this thing where we flex and we change what we do based off of the natural cycles of the earth. But because we've just been, had this thing called coal, which you could just burn whenever we wanted, we've not had to have.That pressure in the rest of our world. And what renewables is bringing into the world right now is like, well look you, you can actually do I find it? I actually find it quite beautiful because oftentimes we're way disconnected from nature. And one way I think about carbon awareness is actually I'm building software, which responds to natural cycles of the earth.And it connects me with nature in a, in a, in a kind of abstract, an indirect way, but it's one of the few ways you can connect with nature. I think in software,Henry Richardson: It's a really good, interesting point about the electric grid in that it's very unique in the sense that it needs to be balanced instantaneously at all times. There's no flexibility in terms of timing. So if there's a demand on the electric grid that has to be met immediately, you can grow rice and store it in a silent.Or it's an, a grain elevator for a while and then release it. The electric grid has to be instantaneous and until we have a lot more storage or pumped hydro, we're not going to have that flexibility. And so demand has to kind of follow supply much more closely.Scott Chamberlin: I think it was in California, right. Where they're starting to look at in terms of increasing storage by starting to enable all this, the growing amounts of EVs in the world. Connecting those batteries and utilizing them as a bunch of local storage. So we have this like future that's way more complex in the sense that, you know, we're, we're drastically increasing the amount of storage.Sometimes it's centralized storage. Sometimes it's this municipal storage. That's like, you know, you're, you're , and it's just can be a local buffer, not only for your house, but also for your driving. And you could charge that in a carbon aware way. And then. You know, we're adding municipal, solar, ratting, you know, utility, solar, adding all this.And I think, you know, the grid gets way more complex, but like you're saying, ask them, I think it all slowly, you know, you get these new patterns, these new natural patterns that start to arise out of it. Yeah. The technology is going to play a really key role in all of this, how to, how to implement. Henry Richardson: I'll toss another bit of jargon in here, V2G vehicle degrades. So there's both smart charging of your vehicle, but there's also can that vehicle actually push power back to the grid at important periods? Whew. It's all software driven, even though it's living on hardware. One other question for you.Awesome. Cause I, I think we're approaching the end here, which is. One of the things that we're excited about, this is that it puts the capabilities in the hands of developers to actually affect this. This is something that a developer can make a decision about actually make, may affect the software that they're working on and have a real emissions effect.Is that something that you've explored with?Asim Hussain: Oh, you talking about some of the projects that are working in the foundation, because we have one particular project, which is a carbon aware of soft SDK, the software development kit, which is a lot of what we're describing here. I mean, the logic is the same. Every single company wants to implement carbon awareness is pretty much just creating the same logic.And so one of our projects is create the carbon where software development care, which is gonna enable people to enable developers to much more easily implement some of this logic and functionality. And I remember when I was having, we were having conversations with our team and kind of the same thing came up, which was I w w we started this with this idea that we're going to reduce the carbon emissions of software, but actually software drives everything.So this SDK could be used. For, I have an E vehicle in my driveway. So it could, I could build something to leverage it and charge my Evie based off of, you know, some sort of signal or heating my house or something like that, because I think that's, that's one of the things we're seeing is if we can just make it easier for people to do this, then the more likely to, to, to implement a lot of these things.And I'm seeing it, I'm seeing it implemented another place as well as lots of websites that, and I love the impact might not be so good. In terms of carbon savings, but impact's quite high in terms of making people aware of what the potential is. There's a really great magazine called Branch Magazine from one of our colleagues here, Chris, Chris Adams, and you know, the it's an online web magazine, which changes its behavior based off of electricity grids.And so the images will disappear if it's, if it's high carbon intensity and replace it with text and words. And that's really good because everybody reading that is suddenly then aware of this entire concept, because people aren't aware of it in the.Henry Richardson: One of the pieces that I think I really like about it too, is that a lot of this is being driven by the developers themselves. Not necessarily the sustainability to. Like the corporate sustainability team at these organizations, they're like the developers see an opportunity. They understand how the code works and can actually make a decision about how to drive emissions or that.Scott Chamberlin: I a hundred percent agree with you. I mean, some of that is natural in the sense that the. Inability to step in. Most corporations are driven a lot of times to the supply chain organizations. And a lot of times that's because the measured CO2 impacts a lot of the majority of is sometimes coming from.Supply chain, but I think the opportunity in terms of cost versus benefit on the software side, I think is it's, it's an area where we can change faster and have some initial impacts greater than some of the supply chain teams, which supply chain changes, which are our longer term kind of things. And to be clear, all of those, both sides of the thing are totally interleaved.There's not a fine line between them. Asim Hussain: So I think that's all we've got time for today. So it was really wonderful conversation that we want. And just a final thought for me. I just want to give a shout out to an event that's happening in the middle of June. So the foundation has a summit, a global summit, which has been run over 20 locations around the world.If you want to meet other like-minded people, people like us kind of thinking and talking about these topics. You know, come find us a confined your local event at summit.greensoftware.foundation.Scott Chamberlin: I think the final thought is that, you know, having gone and tried to build carbon aware software, it was as long as you're making sure that you have the ability to measure and that you are. Actually doing the engineering that is going to have an impact it's actually super motivating to look at. And it's actually the technologies.It's a rich, rich area of technology. And it's may seem intimidating when we add these new kind of terms about to, about how the grid operates. You have to think about a, yet another thing is software, but it's, it's really, once you get in there, the concepts are pretty straightforward and adjusting yourself.Do this kind of stuff is actually not too hard. So I'd encourage folks to, to try it out at least. Henry Richardson: I think one of the things. About, as people are coming up with use cases that we never thought about. So scheduling windows updates, like we hadn't even considered that as a possibility. So people come up with very creative ideas, but with region shifting location, shifting that, that we would never have thought of.And so we're always excited to see that kind of expanding possibilities for loaded flexing.Asim Hussain: Thanks for listening to Environment Variables, all the resources for this podcast, including links to our guests and more about carbon where computing as well as the Green Software Foundation. The show description below. We hope you enjoyed the show and see you on the next one. Hey everyone. Thanks for listening.Just a reminder to follow environment variables on apple podcasts, Spotify, Google podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please do leave a rating and review. If you like what we're doing, it helps other people discover the show. And of course we want more listeners to find out more about the Green Software Foundation, please visit green software.foundation.Thanks again and see you in the next episode.[END]

In this episode Asim is joined by guests Chris Adams, Sara Bergman and Danielle Erickson and they discuss the impact that Amazon’s Customer Carbon Footprint Tool is having on the green software landscape. How do services like AWS affect climate change and what are the effects on the environment of these huge data centres? We also learn about how you can use heat from greenhouses to grow tomatoes!Learn more about our guests:Chris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / Website Sara Bergman: LinkedIn / Twitter Danielle Erickson: LinkedInEpisode resources:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter Person: Adrian Cockcroft Blog: David MyttonBlog: SRE Methods & Climate Change - Benoit Petit Presentation: Green Cloud Triangle Magazine: Branch MagazineIf you enjoyed this episode then please either:Follow, rate, and review on Apple PodcastsFollow and rate on SpotifyConnect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!Transcript below:[background music]Danielle Erickson: We're looking at the AWS tool, the Google tool, and the Microsoft tool and understanding the broader strategy, so when you combine those two things, I think that's what we have to do right now to strategize in the best way to reduce our emissions.Asim Hussain: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discuss the latest news and events surrounding Green Software. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software. I'm your host, Asim Hussain. Welcome to Environment Variables, our new podcast. My name is Asim Hussain. I'm the executive director of the Green Software Foundation.Chris Adams: Hi, there. My name is Chris Adams. I am one of the directors of the Green Web Foundation.Asim: The Green Web Foundation, the Green Software Foundation, there's a story behind that.Chris: There is indeed.Danielle: Hi. I'm Danielle Erickson. I am the product manager of the Cleantech service line at Thoughtworks and the product manager of an open-source tool we created called Cloud Carbon Footprint.Sara Bergman: Hi. My name is Sara Bergman. I am a software engineer at Microsoft and I'm also the chair of the writer's project in the Green Software Foundation.Asim: All right. I think we're here today to at least start off talking about Amazon's Customer Carbon footprint tool that they announced recently. This is something I saw they announced in re:Invent which if I remember right, was it November or December in last year, in 2021? They announced it in November or December and it's a method of measuring the carbon emissions of customers' workloads on Amazon.I don't know how all you all feel about it but I was really impressed with just the speed with which they made their second announcement, which was just, when was it? Weeks ago now or maybe February, they then announced it in preview. It was incredible breakneck speed. I was expecting from their re:Invent to wait a year for them to publish something. For me, that was a really, I felt like I had a whiplash. I was like, "Whoa." Has anybody else had a chance to look at their announcement?Chris: I have. I think it's really cool. I'm really, really glad that something like this exists because if you consider yourself a responsible technologist, I figure the electricity has to come from somewhere, and being able to have this information allows you to optimize for carbon and given the information that is shared with us increasingly in the news, it's worthwhile actually referring to this. For example, the WPC, so the IPCC report explicitly mentions digital and the role we have to play now in that. Having the tools to instrument that is really, really handy. We actually used to work on something like this. A couple of years ago, we built a tool called Amazon Green Cost Explorer, which basically used some of the billing API to work out which regions were green and which ones were not green, so you can act on this. To actually have something much more fine and green is really, really cool, but it's not the only project going in this field, I suppose. It might be worth talking about that, yes, there are other ways that you can understand the environmental impact if you compute than just using this, for example, even though it's very, very useful and very, very welcome.Sara: Yes. I think that's a really good point. I think, for example, if you think about performance, some people are very interested in getting into the nitty-gritty. I want to read the logs, I want to really get down to it but others are just I want to see my latency. I think the same goes for carbon, right? For some, this will be revolutionary and this will be a great way to get any kind of insight but there are others who are ahead of the pack where maybe the granularity isn't enough or isn't timely enough or whatever but this isn't a really good first step in my opinion.Danielle: This is something that customers have been asking for for a while, so to see Amazon respond in this way and give some visibility that I believe is generally available, this tool. Anyone who uses AWS can see their carbon emissions over time is really incredible. It's a great step in the right direction and as Chris already said, there is a lot more regulatory pressure to be reporting on this. Everyone's going to need this and I think if Amazon can make this first step, we can hope that in the future, they'll continue to respond to this demand and this need the customers are having, so really excited about this.Asim: This is my mistake as well. It's generally available, is it now, Danielle? I just assumed it was a preview.Danielle: That was my understanding, but Sara, you may know better?Sara: No, I heard the same. It sounded like it was for everyone who uses their services.Asim: Yes, it's done.Danielle: Yes.Asim: Wow. That is very impressive to go. I mean, it means they were working on this for a long time, I think. You don't come up with a tool like this in two, three months. This has been something they've been working on for a while under the covers, I imagine.Chris: I think you're right, Asim. I mean, if you've been following this, Amazon have been hiring for sustainability specialists for the last two or three years. Also, if you look at the VP of cloud at the moment, I think, or one of the VP of Sustainability, Adrian Cockcroft, he's been speaking about this for a very long time. If you followed him on Twitter, he's actually had a lot to say about this even in the pre-Amazon days, actually. It's really, really cool to actually see some leadership here on this. I'm quite impressed with this as well because between 2019, there was actually a talk by AWS specifically at a conference called, Map Camp where they were explicitly calling this stuff out.They said, "Look, if you want to do this, you're going to need to tell us as customers because we're not seeing the customer demand for this." There's a slide of Mr. Cockcroft standing with a big thing behind saying "The thing you can do is move to the green region." Now the thing they've created now is something which provides a bit more visibility to that, so rather than just having that as your option, you've got ways to optimize the actual compute in place rather than having to take on what in many ways could be a risky or scary migration that you might have to weigh up against other things like feature development or the other things that product manager or a CEO might be asking for.Asim: For me, it felt like the cherry on the top because Microsoft announced their, I think it's now called the Emissions Impact Dashboard a year ago. Then I think it was six months ago that Google announced their dashboard as well and so with Amazon coming out on it as well now, that's all three of the major clouds, all [unintelligible 00:06:39] use that major clouds now have a capability of customers, basically being able to answer questions along the lines of, 'Well, how much carbon emissions is all of my emissions?" This is where I think Thoughtworks would be leading the pack as well because I've forgotten what you call it. I keep on getting confused, Cloud Carbon Footprint. Is it?Danielle: Yes, that's it. Yes. [laughs]Asin: Okay. Yes. Cloud Carbon Footprint tool because you've actually been developing essentially an open-source version of this for a while. You must have some really deep insights into how do you actually go away and calculate some of these numbers?Danielle: It's been really cool seeing the three different tools come out and right now, our team is going through an internal process of reviewing each of the different tools and understanding the variety of features that each of them has is what they have to offer. As much as we can understand how they're getting the data and the methodologies they use to calculate carbon emissions, we're trying to do so because each of them are going to give you really the best numbers you can get for each of those individual cloud providers, but one thing that they're unable to do at the moment is compare between each other.For many organizations, the majority are multi-cloud users and if you're trying to look holistically at your sustainability strategy and your cloud emissions, you likely want to see them in one place and also using a similar methodology. If you're looking to compare, if you're looking to really optimize, take action, you'd want to compare them apples to apples, not oranges to apples. For our perspective, using all of these tools together is really the best strategy. Have a lot of tools in your pocket to understand what's going on and then begin to understand the areas you can start to make changes.[music]Asim: I think we've talked enough about all the glowing praise for all these three tools. We now dig into the issues with them. I think one of them, like you just touched on there is exactly how is Amazon calculating its numbers? How is Microsoft calculating its numbers? How is Google calculating its numbers? There's a lot of opaqueness because they're not revealing that. They're just revealing, 'Here's your total number."Chris: This is one thing that I could share some light on, I suppose. There is some good news in that increasingly organizations are now talking about essentially, how they share which parts they do measure, which parts they do not measure inside this. We have established ways to track some of this stuff. There are things from the GHG protocol, which is an organization that pretty much sets some standards for this and they talk about things in terms of Scope 1, which is burning for carbon emissions on-site, Scope 2, which is electricity, and then Scope 3, which is stuff in your entire supply chain.A lot of the time when you might look at some of this, you might have people talking about just Scope 1 and Scope 2, for example, without necessarily talking about the Scope 3 part. If you look at say, I know this is one thing that both Google and Amazon don't include in their numbers is basically the environmental impact from creating the servers in the first place. This is one thing that's probably worth talking about because well, they have to come from somewhere, and it's obviously an energy-intensive process to turn sand into silicon chips.This is one thing that I've been quite impressed with because there actually are a few open issues on cloud carbon footprint to start piecing together some of these numbers because this is actually very much considered the next step, now that stuff is being done on the energy front. There's a really good blog post in the show notes by David Mitten, who's been writing about this. I'd really recommend his blog because he provides a really, really useful set of incisive analyses in this field.Sara: Yes, I think that's an excellent point. Depending on the type of application that you have, the hardware emissions just from creating a server or whatever, the network devices, whatever you use can actually outweigh the pure energy cost of it. It depends, of course, on multiple factors, but it definitely can be the case. When we talk about engineering and engineering enablement, there are some pretty easy things that you can do to decrease the amount of hardware that you use, but if you're not getting measured on it, how will you be incentivized to do those actions?If it's pure cost, well, we are very much relying on cloud providers being kind enough to give us a cost which is mapping to carbon, but that isn't necessarily true always. Right?Asim: Yes. I think just essentially from my understanding, Microsoft's emissions dashboard gives you Scope 1, 2, and 3, so it tells you the carbon emissions of your workload, your energy consumption, just to break it down a simpler format, your energy consumption and your hardware. Google currently just gives you your energy consumption of your workload. I have actually assumed the Amazon one was all three but is it just energy again? It's just energy again, so Amazon is just energy?Danielle: Yes, one and two.Chris: I've read the 451 report. In the announcement, there is a report by 451, and they explain what's in the model and outside the model. They basically said, "We're not looking at embedded energy, and the actual machines themselves, and we're not looking at Scope 3 at present. We're not necessarily looking at Scope 1 because it's not quite so tight." This is primarily about the energy part and this is also why the numbers, as far as I'm aware, there is a lag, because they're looking to get the most accurate numbers, just like how Google do where they basically say, "We will move as fast as we can, but we are working with very, very large providers who might not bill on the same monthly basis. We wait until we have the information from energy providers, so we can give you an up-to-date number." This is what is actually shared to my understanding.I've got to stress, I do not work at Amazon, so there may be much more detail that may be there that I'm not so aware of.Danielle: I'm not exactly sure the full reason for that lag but my understanding is it's about three months, which if you're getting very accurate information, can be helpful to look back and understand over the course of the year. I do see a challenge to the consumer actually trying to make changes and use this data. How can I act on data today that's three months old? It becomes a little bit difficult to build into your workflow, to make decisions day to day based on three-month-old data. That's something to consider, I think, with this tool, and maybe something they can improve in the future.Sara: Yes. What they're stating in their announcement is that it is the underlying billing cycle for the electrics utilities and I believe that Google is doing the same, but they are also quite late in showing. It really limits what you can use it for. It's still great for some type of comparisons. If I have two applications that are similar, which one do I continue with? Those sort of things, it's very good for, or comparing over time, but doesn't really tell you what I should do tomorrow. I think as more and more software companies move away from the waterfall and move into more and more aggressive agile- three months, no, is anyone going to be really happy with that? I don't know, maybe.Chris: Maybe there's one thing that you can talk about here in terms of, there may be different uses for this data, for example. I know that when I've spoken to people who are looking to use things like cloud carbon footprint, they've told me that there's two main use cases that you tend to have. There might be engineers like yourself or me when we want something like an SLO for carbon, I want to be a green SRE and there's a really nice post by a guy called Benoit Petit, who is one of the lead contributors to a French project called [unintelligible 00:14:34] which basically provides per-process level energy usage information that could provide these numbers.He talks about this stuff as an SRE saying, "Well, these are the numbers I need to basically optimize for, and I should have dashboards like this." There's some really nice work by the folks at Mapbox, who've been speaking about this for a while. They were some of the early contributors to the early green cross-explorer stuff for this where they were talking about, "Well, if we review our bills on a weekly basis, and we use that to shape our usage, it'd be awesome if we could do this for carbon because we're already good at optimizing for some kind of metrics, so it would be really nice to have something that."Increasingly, we do actually see numbers like that now. There are schemes which do make this stuff possible. Just last week, for example, there was a new standard which has been proposed called granular certificates by a number of organizations. This gives you hourly settlement for this stuff, which is really, really, really impressive. This isn't that well known yet, but this is the kind of stuff that what the future looks like in my view. I look forward to the time where this is actually a thing that you can optimize for as an engineer, and you can see on a dashboard, for example, for your team.Asim: I think really, the issue here is that we want to celebrate this work on the work that we're doing, but it's not quite there as a dashboard, that from an engineering perspective, teams can use to actually give them information to make decisions. That's basically the challenge that we've all got. As we're sitting there and we've got options between one, two, and three different architectural types or different choices. This doesn't quite give you that level of granular-- Regardless of even the methodological differences between the different platforms, even the granularity won't give you that.I can't speak for how Amazon does it. I do have some experience for how the Microsoft dashboard works, and it is very averaged out data. Multiple servers will always report the same energy consumption regardless of what you do because that's just how it's been calculated. That works great the thing you're talking about what is it used for? They're designed for reporting purposes. They're designed so organizations can calculate and report their carbon emissions to CDP or perhaps have an understanding regarding what are the offsets or neutralization strategies we need to employ. That's just what they're designed for. It's not built for engineers with the caveat of-- I think Google is on an interesting track.Sara: Yes. If you think like a person in an individual team with a small portfolio, then I completely agree, but maybe if your step up, so if you're someone who is responsible for a larger portfolio of services, then suddenly this means you're able to compare them. Sure the data is older, but I can then start to evaluate, "Okay, how much value is this service provided me compared to service B, and how much is their carbon footprint."If one is vastly higher, but providing me less business value, then that's a decision on a leadership or a planning level that you can take that these dashboards enable that you would not have been able to reach without this. It really depends on what kind of decisions you're trying to make based on this dashboard.Danielle: Yes, this is something that we thought about a lot when building the open-source Cloud Carbon Footprint tool. Our perspective has been trying to reach that engineer level, that day-to-day decision-making level with as much granularity as we can build in and as much real-time as we can try to make the tool, taking billing data immediately and turning it into carbon emission estimations. Not to repeat myself, but I think the benefit of having multiple options here is that you can combine them for these different uses that you have.Your engineers can look at both tools, combine the data that they're seeing from the Cloud Carbon Footprint on a day-to-day basis, and then talk to their infrastructure leads who are looking at the AWS tool, the Google tool, and the Microsoft tool, and understanding the broader strategy. When you combine those two things, I think that's what we have to do right now to strategize in the best way to reduce our emissions.Asim: Especially the fact that because Cloud Carbon Footprint is open source, not only is your methodology public, but your data and the underlying data assumptions are very low, granular level are public. I can see what is the energy-- If I'm using this particular server, this particular load that data is public. We're actually using that in the foundation in the software carbon intensity standard, where you're leveraging that data because it helps engineers calculate the carbon emissions of processes or estimate the carbon emissions of processes, so they can then make those kinds of decisions.It's the openness of the data is, I think, also missing with these tools. I've also heard it's extremely difficult for Amazon and Google and Microsoft to make this data public. It's not only they're revealing competitive information, there might also be legal constraints. If you reveal some of this information, the SEC might come after you because you're revealing proprietary information. There's actually lots of complications around that, from what I've heard. I wonder if others have thoughts on that, on the openness of data.Chris: I can actually weigh in a bit on this, which might be of use because you have a similar thing happening in the energy sector just the one layer below right now. One thing that we've seen pushback from people who run the energy grids in various places, they've typically said, "We are not able to share information about how congested various parts of the big transmission wires that move power around because we see that as a security risk." but this is actually a thing that we've heard in lots and lots of places. In many cases, a lot of the time you could see there's a trend towards opened for a bunch of this stuff.I feel like a lot of the time, if you're not designed or if you aren't used to sharing things open by default then you can come up with a lot of- it's understandable that you might not want to share a bunch of this stuff. There will be cases where you might not want to share this for very valid reasons. For example, there are probably valid reasons for not listing where geographically every single data center might actually be. Even if this may be information that as a customer you might want know if you want to understand what climate risk is associated with all the machines running in a particular place.Especially when we refer to examples like say- a most recent risk example might be the big Facebook data center, the big data center from Meta and Zeewolde in the Netherlands. That's eight meters below sea level, that gigantic data center. That's the thing you might want to know about in a world of rising sea levels. That's some of the stuff which is useful to know about, but going back to the original point. not everyone's ready to share information on a very, very open basis just yet, but I suspect that over time this will have to come up because well, environmental factors will increasingly push this and necessitate this kind of disclosure.This is actually one of the things that's been driving a lot of this stuff right now. It's because investors are basically saying, "I need to understand the disclosure in my supply chain." or "I'm invested in you as a company. I need you to share this information so I can end up with a net-zero portfolio. If you don't have these numbers, it's going to be very, very hard for you to share that." In many cases, organizations will basically say, 'Well, I'm not going to invest in you. I'm going to invest in someone else. At least I know whether risk is there." We're not open yet, but the more often we do get, the easier it is to make data-informed decisions as we move forward into this changing climate world.Sara: Now, I see the same security issues for hardware as well. Do you want to state exactly what type kind of servers are on your server [unintelligible 00:22:25] floors? Maybe not because there has been hardware security incidents in the past, I'm sure we'll see them in the future. Then you might not want to say exactly what you have, but there can also be an argument for finding what is a valid enough proxy that you don't state explicitly that this is this type of server, but exactly this hardware. I built it like this. I specify carbon cost or some other tangible number that gives you the information that you need without being a security risk.That is, of course, a lot of work especially if we think across all cloud providers even if your company is your own cloud provider while being on Preem, you would want to be able to compare across the stack. The lining on that without being open is difficult. That we're going to guess what our competitors use. I don't think that's a good approach. It's quite exciting from an engineering perspective, just the complexity of some of those things.Asim: That's a really good point that you mentioned about what data can you reveal? Because this is what we're talking about with the software carbon intensity specification in the foundation is what we want. We're talking at one level about give us all the data, but really, why do we want this data? We're actually trying to calculate our carbon emissions. Well, what really would be quite useful is just the carbon intensity. It's like this server, I don't necessarily care what the components are. I want to know how much carbon per CPU, per minute of this [unintelligible 00:23:55].I want to have that data, and if I have that kind of data, that's actually probably all that I need from an engineering perspective. That's probably all that I need in order to make decisions. It'll be a wonderful world in the future where everybody is essentially giving you this data is what is the carbon intensity of my service? What is the carbon intensity of this streaming service we're using right now? What's the carbon per minute? That's all I really need.Chris: It might be worth looking at some work that's happening in the web world that I've seen. There are tools like website carbon and increasingly there are tools that plug into analytics like Google Analytics to give you an idea of what the environmental footprint of some digital services over time might actually be. One thing that I've seen in the web world right now is this real push for having carbon budgets for websites. One company, Wholegrain Digital, they basically say, 'No website that we build will cost more than two grams of CO2 emissions per page load. That sounds really silly on a per-page load basis. Some websites get quite a lot of page loads, so over time this stuff adds up.If we just zoom out for a second and think in the outside world, there is a huge amount of science saying, "Yes, we have a budget we need to stay inside." If you look at the energy sector, they themselves have a carbon budget that they have agreed to stay inside which is why you have massive compliance markets. It makes sense. Probably we would also need to have something like that as well if we want to stay inside, like I guess the dictates of science. We don't get to change the physics of climate change but we can at least change some of the economics around climate change.We can at least do something around this so we can optimize for carbon as developers, so when we're building services, they tread more lightly or as lightly as possible given the various other requirements would be nice to meet as professionals, I suppose.Asim: It's interesting that you mentioned the carbon budget as two grams per page load, because that's an intensity, not a total. I think that's the thing that I talk about a lot that total budgets are really challenging in our world because there's just- how can you set a one-ton budget for our website? You have no idea how many users are going to land on it, but an intensity is, "Oh, [unintelligible 00:26:10]. '"Chris: I'm not so sure about that.Asim: Oh, interesting. Let's go.Chris: Here's the thing, Let's say you're going to go with this. You have a $2,000 budget or something like that because you know that you're probably going to get this many page views over a given time. This is the thing that you're seeing in procurement and contracting these days. They're basically saying, "Well, we have been given legally binding targets that we need to reduce our emissions by 5% a year, a year between now and 2030. That's it. We don't get to do not do this now it's in the law. If they have that, then they're going to have to say, 'Well, we're going to spend €100 million, £100 million on this contract for the next two or three years. We basically have an implicit budget that we need to stay inside."You do have something like that now. It may be the case that okay, having just one number over three years isn't very useful. You might want to have some smaller timeframes or something like that. This is why it might be useful to have a rate for this because you can say, "Well, given that I have this, I now have something I can act upon. I can either change the size of a page for example or I can change the intensity of the electricity so that's going to allow me to stay inside it. It gives me more options." I think it's useful to have the total number because this is essentially what's driving things from a science and regulation point of view. As a developer you might not be able to use it on a daily basis.If you have CI for example, you're going to want to have a unit because that's what you're used to using for your score from say, Google's web vitals. A web vital score is going to be a rate that you can refer to or something you can look at. It's not going to say over six months. It's a kind of volume basically. I think you need both, Asim, not just one, but it's very, very useful to have the ratio, absolutely.Sara: I think tools like the tool we've been talking about today, Amazon's new tool, that can give you that from an OKR perspective because you can see, "Okay, what's my cost? What's my page views? I do the simple division and I do get these numbers, but once again, it's for reporting purposes. If you've never reported on it, this is better than not reporting on it for sure. Totals are also interesting because you can go to a rate assuming you have the other end of the fraction, but sometimes you want to go the other way. That can be a lot trickier without the really granular data.Chris: Sarah said something really interesting here about going both ways and about if you've got a total number, you can go down from there. I've mentioned Wholegrain Digital before because I'm a really big fan of what they do and EcoPing is another group that do this stuff as well as Mightybytes who built a tool called Ecograder almost 10 years ago where they were tracking this kind of stuff. The model that is used, they call it the sustainable web design model that is basically based on a global figure for all the initial used by all the entire internet tech sector divided by all the data transfer that is facilitated by this.This is a bit of a course figure, but at least gives you something that you can act upon and work with. This is actually one thing that I think it's going to be live next week, as being able to use some of the tools that you do use if you build websites and have things like that. It's useful to have those kind of stuff. In many cases, you need to understand what the model is actually representing to see what's going into that, for example. In the example of CO2-GS, for example, this is using network transfer as a proxy to talk about things like, say, usage at a device level or usage at a data center level.Once again, without having access to the open models, it's very difficult to know where your interventions are going to make a meaningful difference. This is why I'm actually quite happy that things like Cloud Carbon Footprint are open enough and are accepting [unintelligible 00:30:07] requests. You can basically say, "Well, this is what I think is going on. This is what I'm trying to do in good faith to reduce the emissions of whatever service I'm building."Sara: Yes. I think we should also maybe mention that the granularity only matters if you have an application or service that changes rapidly. Not every software does that right, that we have stable software that's in a maintenance mode or for whatever reason, isn't that interesting to change frequently. Then this is honestly good enough. You don't need hourly data for a service that you're going to update twice a year. That's not needed. I think it's interesting to compare to, for example, the transportation sector.I was taking a train recently in Norway, and on the app, they showed me by taking this train, you've saved this much carbon. I got annoyed. What is this magic number? Then I clicked on it and they actually showed the entire methodology. I'm like, compared to flight, if ou are one person, da, da, da, this is how much. If you were to take one four-person car, you were one of those four people, this is how much you would save. I was pleasantly surprised. The reason they can do that is that is because the cost of fuel and the cost of building a car doesn't change that frequently. They can calculate this once and then use it for a really long time. For software that's tricky. You have rapidly changing software, so this is something to keep in mind.Danielle: The thought that you brought up, Sarah, about stable applications made me think of a trend work seeing with usually more mature organizations to try to start understanding, if I have stable applications and I also have typical architecture practices that I continue to use, can I start to understand particular architecture choices that impact different carbon and energy use? How can I understand and learn from those architecture choices over time, and then maybe even automate that process? I learned that this particular architecture choice is less carbon-intensive. Can I just make a dashboard or facilitate provisioning certain services in that way?Asim: Danielle, I think you're right. This is one thing that we haven't really got around to developing a language for yet about how you optimize for carbon at various places. in the show notes, I've shared a link to a thing called the Green Cloud Triangle, but we've spoken about this. There's a kind of iron triangle of compute cycles, response time, and cost that you might want to be doing trade-offs of. For example, there may be cases where you want to optimize for response time and cost. This is stuff where you might say, if you want something to be cheap spun quickly, you might go for say, static pre-build stuff.For example, you're not doing too much dynamic stuff. This is stuff we know already a lot of the time. It may be that there are some cases where you don't need to have things happen immediately, right? You might be more interested in keeping the costs low, but making sure you've got lots of compute cycles. We might use this in terms of having queues or tools or things like that.Then finally, this is like the default that a lot of us end up using when we're not thinking about this, which is basically optimizing for compute cycles and response time, not really thinking too much about the cost part or not really knowing that the cost can change in this way. This is like speaking to the fact in many cases and what I think we're going to see more of every time is that the cost of electricity changes depending on the time of day. This is not really exposed to us right now, but it's something that is definitely visible, that does definitely happen especially if you look at the markets such that sometimes the cost of electricity can go negative, so you can be paid to use Compute, for example.I feel like there needs to be a set of tools or a way to describe this stuff so you can take advantage of these changes that have been happening one layer down in the stack, so that you can basically architect for better, more responsive things, but also in a way that's actually very. very planet-friendly as well as wallet-friendly. I think there's a couple of good posts on the Green Software Foundation blog specifically about this. I might have written one of them, but the other ones have also been written by other contributors.[laughter]Sara: Well, I can speak about electricity because I think that's interesting. Many of these cloud providers, they say that it takes a long time for electricity utilities to get to them. During this winter in Norway, we only have hydro here, so if it doesn't rain, electricity becomes expensive or if it's really, really cold, all our water is frozen, it becomes expensive. There were these newsletters reporting almost hourly on like, 'This is how much it costs to charge a smartphone right now. This is how much it costs to use the oven right now." Obviously, we know what the electricity costs right now. I wonder how hard it would be to propagate that.It doesn't always correlate to carbon though. My carbon cost was the same throughout the day because it was hydro, but their cost changed.Asim: Yes. If cost- [unintelligible 00:35:05] cost is a proxy for carbon, really at the end of the day, I think here.Chris: All right, you're talking about cost as a proxy for carbon, and that's because a lot of the time when you have more electricity than you need on the grid, it's lunchtime and it's sunny as hell, or it's windy as hell, you've got more than you need. The problem with the grid is that the grid has to basically be balanced the entire time. Otherwise, basically, very, very bad things happen and very expensive hardware gets damaged that falls off-grid. You can end up with incentives to basically-- If you operate a grid, it's cheaper. It's easier for you to basically just set the cost of electricity to be lower than it is to ask someone who runs a big nuclear power station to please turn down the output to make sure stuff is balanced, for example.This is the thing that you are often doing. This is why the cost will change over time, depending on how much demand there is compared to how much supply there is. Most of the time we're shielded from this, but it's actually quite fascinating. It's stuff that you can absolutely take advantage of because companies do this. Google make a really big thing about shifting loads to when energy is green, but the reason that they do that is it really saves a bunch of as well as just carbon, basically.Asim: Yes. That's the secret to a lot of our spaces that there is cost savings, a lot of this stuff as well.Sara: I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing. Capitalism runs large parts of this world. If we can get those forces to work with us, promote us to a greener future, we shouldn't necessarily be against it. I'm saying capitalism is always awesome, but you take the wins where you can find them.Chris: This speaks to incentive design, basically and who's making good use of this. There's a really nice example of organizations. There's one organization in America called Lancium, and there's another one in Germany called XMesh. They take advantage of this. They basically take data centers which is basically a shipping container full of machines, which will otherwise be thrown out from hyper-scalers like Facebook. They put them on renewable energy parks. What they end up doing is they end up providing stuff for either-- okay, I'm not a huge fan of the cryptocurrency stuff, but you can use the same thing for machine learning models as well.Anything, which is a plausible load that is quite compute-intensive is a really good fit for this use of an oversupply of renewable energy in many cases. This is what Lancium and XMesh both do now. By being able to be plugged straight into places where they have energy, that they otherwise would not be able to use, they basically end up being able to provide Compute for a much, much lower cost. You can get your machine learning models done at a fraction of the price from some of other larger providers by going with this because they're taking advantage of the economics and how they've changed over the last 10 years that in many cases say some other there haven't taken advantage of yet.Asim: Why is that more economical? At the end of the day, those servers are servers that they got essentially maybe for free or very, very, very reduced cost. They must be four or five years old.Chris: There are two reasons. Moore's law has slowed down over the last, say five years, for example, before you could just rely on [unintelligible 00:38:20] to do this work. As a result, servers which are maybe two or three years old, aren't actually that much slower than they were previously. If you've got something like a plausible load, because you are not trying to run it 24/7 all the time, if you have different requirements for keeping this stuff cool, for example. Unlike, if we're going to talk about keeping cool, for example, there are some really nice examples in the Netherlands where they basically have shipping containers full of servers.Once again, these are servers which are end of life. They plug them into greenhouses with the idea being that the waste heat, rather than basically vented into the sky, or you spend loads and loads of money trying to get rid of it because you see it as a waste product, they use it to pump into greenhouses, so they end up with really nice juicy tomatoes. This is a really, really cool use of heat because the greenhouse folks, they were like, 'Well, we can either burn fossil fuels for heat or we could just use that heat from over there." This is an example of taking advantage of-- If you understand the underlying energy systems, then there are all these fascinating, new, pretty cool use cases. I don't know about you, but the idea of, I don't know, a greenhouse connected to a data center and juicy tomatoes, that sounds cool. I like that idea.Asim: I do know, actually that heating greenhouses is one of the biggest costs for greenhouses. That's wonderful. I love that.Chris: There are loads of examples here. When you look at the next challenges we are facing between now and the next say, five to 10 years, one of the big ones is heating things up. What we have right now is we have a massive data street full of data centers thinking, "I've got all this heat, how do I get rid of it?" It feels like maybe the people saying, "Well, if only we could find a way to get heat." and then we'll tell the people saying, "Oh if only I could go find it, we'll get a way of getting rid of this heat." If they could talk to each other, then maybe you could end up with a slightly more efficient system.Now, this isn't going to happen all the time because if you put a gigantic hyperscale data center miles away from everyone else, it's going to be harder to integrate that into in an urban environment. Then maybe that speaks to the fact that our idea of what a data center needs to look like could change over time to end up with a different topology for the internet because the internet did use to be quite distributed. What we've seen right now over the last 10 years is that the energy sector has ended up looking a lot more like the internet and the internet is now looking a lot more like the energy sector was 10 years ago.I feel like maybe there's scope for us to find some happy medium rather than just zipping past each other in mad decentralization or centralization mania that we have at present.Danielle: I think, Chris, with all that you're saying there's so much opportunity. My question is, where does the responsibility lie to provide that information to consumers, and who is responsible to make these choices of shifting workloads, taking advantage of the energy at different times of day, that type of thing? How much can the cloud providers do and how much can the consumers do and what is that balance? How do we get there? I think it's going to be a really interesting problem that, hopefully, we get to solve in the next few years.Sara: I'd love to see a carbon throttling thing that you can add to your services, whatever cloud provider you have. It's like, Yes, you can carbon social this application. That's fine for me."Chris: There is loads of cool stuff happening in this field right now. Brunch Magazine does examples of this. If you go to brunch.climateaction.tech, it throttles based on the carbon intensity of the grid right now because this is exposed to it. There are also tools [unintelligible 00:41:49], for example, that let you do this stuff. This stuff exists and there are examples of it being built. I think it's a really exciting fun place to be looking at this but there's a whole policy piece that would map to what we're doing here.[background music]Asim: This has been a wonderful conversation. I love all the places we've been to. Maybe let's just end with just one quick thought or idea from each of us and think about the future and something from our conversation. I might start because if I don't, I'll forget. There's something you touched on, Chris, earlier on, I thought was fascinating. You talked about what of Meta's datacentres was going to 8 meters below sea level.One of the things for one of our future podcast episodes I would love to explore is the SEC has just had a proposed I think ruling, I don't know if that's where you got the data from. The SEC has proposed ruling now that organizations have to disclose their climate risks. I'd love to have a conversation about what are the climate risks related to software and green software and sustainability and technology? That's a great example that you gave, and I just thought that's something I'd love to explore in the future.Sara: Final thoughts, placing my tomato plants next to my laptop, number one. Number two, it will be interesting to talk in the future about how the pure economical aspects of where to place a data center will impact the grid. If you're only placing data centers where the grid is green, will that power a green shift in the energy markets?Danielle: I'm having trouble wrapping up all these thoughts. There were so many different avenues. I think something that stuck with me that I'll continue to think about is the idea of carbon intensity and viewing that in conjunction with totals, using these variety of numbers to come up with a strategy. I thought that was really interesting.Chris: I guess that's me left now, actually. Asim, I'll keep it short. I think this points to us having a carbon-aware internet. I think that's a really cool vision, personally. I'll leave it with you, philosophwith you, Mr. Hussein.Asim: Thanks for listening to Environment Variables. All the resources for this podcast, including links to our guests and more about Amazon's customer carbon footprint tool, as well as the Green Software Foundation, and everything else we read discussed today is going to be available in the show description below. We hope you enjoyed the show. See you on the next one.[background music]Asim: Hey, everyone, thanks for listening. Just a reminder to follow on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Google podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Please do leave a rating and review if you like what we're doing. It helps other people discover the show and, of course, we want more listeners. To find out more about the Green Software Foundation please visit greensoftware.foundation. Thanks again. See you in the next episode.[music][00:44:52] [END OF AUDIO]

Join your host Asim Hussain on Environment Variables, a podcast from The Green Software Foundation, and a bunch of experts from varying software and tech fields. In each episode we’ll talk about the latest news regarding how to reduce the emissions of software and how the industry is dealing with its own environmental impact. Find out more:The Green Software Foundation Website Connect with us on Twitter, GitHub and LinkedIn!Asim Hussain: Twitter / GitHub / LinkedIn