Environment Variables

In this episode of Environment Variables, host Chris Adams engages in a fascinating discussion with Marjolein Pordon, a quality consultant at Praegus, about the exciting synergy between sustainability and low code platforms. They explore how low code tools not only streamline software development but also play a crucial role in reducing carbon emissions. Marjolein shares insights into the early integration of sustainability considerations in the development cycle, and together, they demystify the misconception that companies' unique needs necessitate custom software solutions, highlighting the efficiency and environmental benefits of leveraging shared components in low code environments.

Learn more about our people:

• Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | Website
• Marjolein Pordon: LinkedIn | Website

Find out more about the GSF:

• The Green Software Foundation Website 
• Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter

News:

•  Introducing Flowty - Build low carbon, self-hosted Webflow sites - Fershad Irani [23:22]
• Data Center Factsheet [29:36]

Resources:

• Introduction to ESG [11:51]
• ESG and Climate Change | Coursera
• Mendix [14:32]
• WordPress [14:39]
• Zapier [14:49]
• Creatio [14:50]
• N8N [15:39]
• Windmill.dev [22:42]
• OutSystems  [34:15]

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• Watch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!

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TRANSCRIPT BELOW:

Marjolein Pordon: With all the emails we send, inclusive, reply all, the, "yes, I'll see you in a minute." All those kinds of emails, there are 12 000 times from earth to the moon with a car on carbon emission. That's huge.

Chris Adams: 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, Chris Adams.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Environment Variables, the podcast where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams. When we talk about green software, we often talk about optimizing code we already have, or finding out ways to make the energy we use less carbon intensive.

So for the computation we do end up using, we end up with less pollution in the form of greenhouse gases and so on being emitted as a byproduct of our work. However, there's another way to look at this. If we accept that the most efficient database query possible is one that you don't have to make because you've designed a system not to need them,

then you can argue that the most efficient system can be one that you haven't had to spend loads of time, energy and money building, building an entirely custom version of, because you found an existing set of components that work well together. This is essentially the argument made when people make the case that a technology stack containing open source software can be more sustainable than a closed source one.

In that the cost gone into building the various components is shared across all the millions of people who would otherwise be duplicating all this effort, building their own versions of these open source, the components. But does this apply elsewhere as well, though? Low code and no code environments have grown in popularity over the last few years, and one argument in favor of using them is that by building the system, or building any system from a set of existing components offered in a kind of visual, low coding environment, you avoid the need to spend so much time, money, and yes, energy, building your own custom software in the first place.

This brings up all kinds of interesting questions. Does this just mean that we end up with more software in total, because more people are building their own software, rather than a relatively small number of professional developers? And are the needs of organizations so sufficiently generic that you can use low code environments for this kind of stuff, to avoid needing all that custom code?

And if you're stuck using providers who are moving slowly to transition from fossil fuel in their infrastructure, what are your options? With me to explore these ideas today is Marjolein Pordon, one of the few people I've seen talking about both sustainability and low code at the same time. Thanks for joining me today, Marjolein.

Marjolein Pordon: Thanks for having me, Chris.

Chris Adams: Okay, you're welcome, Marjolein. Can I give you a few minutes to introduce yourself and what you do? And because you're the first Marjolein I've ever met, if I'm mispronouncing your name, could you please just share the pronunciation so I can use it properly when I'm later on the call? Because I'm trying my best, but you're the first Marjolein I've ever met.

Marjolein Pordon: Yeah, Marjolein is a Dutch name and you're pronouncing it correct. It's like Mar and then Yo from the rapper, Yo Yo, and then a line, like a thin line. So, Marjolein, that's, that's completely correct. Well, I'm Marjolein Pordon. I'm, 38 years old. I live in the Netherlands and I'm a quality consultant for the company Praegus. Praegus is a test consultancy company, and we also have a branch that looks into low code. And one of our CEOs is very much into sustainability. So I'm really in my place there. She also thinks that we should move to an office with sun, sunlight energy, and wind energy. So it's not just me, but also in the company I work for that we have these standards and I'm now, I think eight years in the business and I really love working in IT, testing and things like that.

So yeah, I'm really happy to be here. Oh, and within low code, I've had a few assignments in low code and it got me the name, nickname Lady Low Code, because I'm so passionate about low code and talking on conferences about it.

Chris Adams: I'm glad you mentioned that actually. First, for the breakdown of Mar-yo-line, that's very easy to understand, but also having an alter ego like Batman is also very interesting and useful to have. And that makes it really easy to find as well for the website. That was one way that we came across you actually.

So, and you mentioned a couple of things that were quite interesting there. So, oh, let me just quickly introduce myself for people who've never listened to this before. So my name is Chris Adams. I am the executive director of the Green Web Foundation. It's a Dutch-based non profit focusing on a fossil-free internet by 2030.

I also work as one of the policy chairs for the Green Software Foundation's policy working group where we basically do work at the intersection of policy and green software. If you are new to this podcast, folks, we will share a transcript of everything and we also, we cover, we mentioned quite a few projects and we'll be listing those in show notes.

So we'll share links to that at the end of that. So if you're listening and there's something caught your eye, please do take a look out for that, because that's one thing that we have available. Finally, okay, back to the podcast. Marjolein, I think you're sitting comfortably?

Marjolein Pordon: Yeah, I am.

Chris Adams: Excellent. Okay, so you mentioned that you didn't always work at this intersection and you worked in a couple of fields where you might specialize, before specialize in this niche, and you said that they've kind of influenced your thinking today, like, could you maybe elaborate on some of that?

Because you spoke about, say, testing and stuff like that, and we know that some of the tools people use for testing end up being the same tools you might use for driving certain activities, driving a browser and stuff like that. So yeah, maybe if I just give you a bit of space to expand on that, then that might help listeners understand some of the connections here or how you got here.

Marjolein Pordon: Yeah, I started as a software tester in 2017. My boyfriend is also a software tester and he said, "yo, you, you would be perfect for it." I started on high code, traditional projects, worked there for, I think, a year or two. And then in 2019, I was available for new assignments and I get really obnoxious then because I don't like doing nothing.

So then a coworker said, "well, you can fill in for a week and a half, it's low code, it's easy. Just do your thing." And then it seemed to be not so easy because low code platforms have standards. You need to use them as required. And people didn't do that. So instead of a week and a half, I was there for a year and a half.

Yeah. So, and then I noticed that if you use low code well, the reusable components make the time to market quicker, but also your energy use lower. And the platform that I was working on then, also now doesn't refer to itself as a local platform, but a sustainability platform, because they say even more important than a quick time to market is that we even can go to market.

Because in the Netherlands, we see that the energy use is that high that companies are not allowed to be connected to the energy network. So that local platform said, "we need to change our way of working, because if we do not do that, we cannot make new apps. Because they're simply not the energy to do that, we'll be cut down.

So we need to do this something. And if other companies don't, then that's up to them. But we make the change because we see that it's necessary for the environment." And I really like that. So I got passionate about low code on the one side and sustainability became a thing. And then in 2022, I was asked for QA&TEST to speak there on green IT. And then I got in contact with professors in Spain and in Portugal, not only on sustainable green IT, but also on the connection with low code. And, well, it got me convinced that we really need to do something because it's, it's scary how much energy resources we use, but also hardware resources we use, because if we make quicker apps, heavier apps, we need new hardware, but we are losing also those resources.

So we need to change the way of thinking and low code, I think, is a good way to help us change the way we feel and think about software development.

Chris Adams: Okay, that's actually... so you said a couple of quite interesting things that I haven't heard people mention before. One of the first things you spoke about was this idea that, okay, given the fact that there's, there are limits that we need to stay inside, the thing we need to do is actually, if we're going to increase the kind of utility of the services we need to do, then we need to make them more efficient.

So we did, a couple episodes ago, we did one all about multi-tenancy, about the idea of like multiple people sharing the same platform and using it in a more kind of efficient way, rather than having the equivalent number of like multiple separate platforms which aren't used very much. And it seems like you're touching on some of those ideas there, because this is actually the first time I've heard groups actually take the kind of limit thing more quite seriously, because you often see folks talking about, "okay, well, we're going to make things more efficient."

But if you look at the large providers, say, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, all of these providers seem to have plans to massively increase the energy use they're using. So this is actually quite a different approach that you've been laying out here. It's like, "well, actually, we're going to use efficiency to kind of book those savings rather than just use it to sell more stuff" basically. Okay. And that was actually quite cool. And the thing that you also mentioned as well was this idea about the testing aspects. Now, I think that there's a term that we spoke about before in the kind of preparation session for this. You mentioned this idea of like shifting left. So, there are things that you would do when you're a tester to make sure you can meet a set of standards.

And it seems like, there's maybe some ideas about applying those things as part of a kind of process, so that you kind of maintain a certain level of efficiency or a certain level of accessibility or sustainability as well. Maybe we could just expand on a little bit of that before we move to the next point.

Marjolein Pordon: Yeah, because if we look to, to testing, usually we come at the end of the development cycle. The things are made and then we test it and then we say, "well, we trust this to work or we not, and" then it needs some rebook. But what we believe as test consultants is the sooner we, the earlier we are connected, then we can think ahead.

We can look to the requirements, but, and not only about the product, but also about the sustainability. Because if we create awareness with the developer. How to make his application more energy efficient, it's better to be done before he starts building. Same with the product owners and the designers and the architects.

They are the ones that should design the system to be energy efficient. And if we all work together and if I as a tester know what they have done, then I can also check that. And it's going to be important because at least in Europe, we have the ESG legislation. And what I hear a lot is that small companies say, "Oh yes, but it's only for the big companies."

Is it? Because if you supply to a big company, you're part of the chain. 

Chris Adams: Yeah.

Marjolein Pordon: and you need to also document and let know that you are efficient. And it could be that you lose some big clients because you do not have the things that they need for the legislation.

So 

Chris Adams: Yeah, I see.

Marjolein Pordon: So, in the whole chain, we need to shift left.

We need to use sustainability as a nonfunctional. And it works broader than just environmental sustainability. Because on the marketing part, we all know that, especially the youth want a better world. If you want those as your clients, and they're gonna grow up, they're gonna work in companies, you need to be green, then you need to show that you care for the world. So, it's not just that you save the planet, but you also save your brand, you save the way people look at you, and you make sure that you are there in a few years.

Chris Adams: I see, okay, so you're referring to like, essentially retaining talent and actually attracting people who are basically looking around and thinking, "hey, we should probably be doing something on this climate thing." And if a company is not kind of living those values, that's going to make them think twice about even, "should I join this organization?

Should I choose to work in this field?" And so on. Okay, thanks, Marjolein. Okay, so we've spoken about low code and no code, and you mentioned that there's like one, you're working for one provider. Maybe it might help to just get a bit concrete, because it's quite a wide ranging term. So when we talk about things like, say, low code, maybe we could talk about some of the kind of better known services, so people get an idea of what they might look for.

So what is, like, a low code system in this case, or who are the companies that do this kind of stuff, perhaps? If you could talk about that, and then maybe we might see if there's any open source equivalents that might be useful for developers who are listening, or people who might want to take some other steps into this field.

Marjolein Pordon: I'm not connected to a particular platform. I have worked, I think, with five platforms, but as an independent tester, what we see is you have different kinds of low code. So some are in the workflow management, you have CRM systems. Webpages, ERP systems, all based on reusable codes and those can be modular.

So like Mendix likes to call drag and drop.

I have a component, I drag it and put it in. WordPress works the same way, but then you build a website. Those like Workflow and Aden, I think is a one, and Zapier,

Chris Adams: Mm.

Marjolein Pordon: and for CRM you have Creatio, and all that I mentioned are open source tooling. And I think that's important because like you said, if you share that knowledge and share those, that code, people don't have to make it their own and they don't have to invent the wheel again.

That's I think important because you don't have to know everything. You need to know where to get it. But also, the energy efficiency and the environmental impact is way lower if we reuse code.

Chris Adams: Okay, thank you for that. So to reiterate, so when we're talking about low code and no code, we might be talking about, so you mentioned a few platforms that people may have heard of. So one is Zapier, which is very, very common that will basically plug into an existing software as a service and then let you make a transform.

And then, and there was another one you mentioned, which was N8N, which is a little bit like a kind of open source, well, open source like equivalent. I'm not sure if they're technically using an open source, it's more like source available, but the general idea is you can run it on your own servers, so you can have a similar idea of pulling information from one place and having little bits of javascript or something like that you run there, with the idea being that you have multi-tenancy, lots of people using the same things, because you'll need a little bit of code rather than having a whole running one.

And you also mentioned that Mendix, which is a more visual option, and, okay, and some of them which are more specifically tied to an existing, say, enterprise system or something like that. Okay, thanks for that. Okay, so we spoke a little bit about, in the intro, some of the arguments people use about where low code might fit into this kind of, into this world of green software and reducing the total resource requirements of, of anything like this, and we've spoken about the idea of lots and lots of people using, say, shared low code.

Shared components in a centralized service. Now, this implies that lots of companies have problems which are similar enough to each other that you can actually solve something like this. And when I've spoken to people in various organizations, they often, one, a common kind of theme is, "oh, our stuff is so unique that the only way we could possibly do this is by hiring a really, really expensive specialized developer because only they, only they could possibly capture the uniqueness of our organization." And this seems to suggest that's not the case. Maybe we could talk a little bit about that, like, is it that companies are over indexing on how unique they are, or where does this fit in, or are there some parts that you can do, but there's still places where you might need a specialist, for example? Maybe you could kind of share a little bit about that, actually.

Marjolein Pordon: Yeah, well, it might not be a popular opinion, but I feel that companies need to convince themselves they're unique because how else are they going to stand out? And what I see with companies that embrace low code is that they say, "well, we choose to look for the components we have in common with other companies. And if we build those components, those modules, those parts that we need in low code, we have time left, we have money left, we have expertise left to build those few things that are customized." So we all know software projects takes ages, deadlines are never met, but what if we use those components that are alike, because every company has parts that align. If I sell something, I need a cash register.

I need a website, all those things align. And if I need a small part that's not aligned that I want different from my competitors, then I can build, let that build by that said expensive developer. But that developer only has to do that little part for maybe a week or two weeks. And the rest is built in low code.

It's energy efficient. I save money. I save time. And I invest for just those parts that I really want to stand out in. And it can also mean that you think that you're just like everything and you build everything in low code and what you save in money, you can add to invest in your company, add new products, do your marketing. So there, the, the low code embracers, I feel say, "yes, we are unique, but we use what we have in common to do in low code and what we do not have in common and stand out, we invest in that."

Chris Adams: Okay, I can follow that argument now, actually. And there's maybe one question I have for you, is basically how these platforms are built, because usually, like, rather than paying to have an entire server or something like that, you might pay for kind of per use, and this is like an argument people make with serverless computing is like if you're paying for the requests or you're just paying for the amount of computation on a kind of per second basis, then you have an incentive to reduce the amount of computation you're using because you have it linked much there, there's a much clearer incentive for you to do this.

Are, is this common? Do you, are there, is it fairly common for, say, low coding tools to bill for, like, provide granular billing in terms of, like, a request made or a kind of run or a workflow? Like, what are the units that people tend to use when they're looking at something like that?

Marjolein Pordon: The bigger platforms I noticed have trouble or are not quite there yet to do that. But there are smaller platforms who say, "well, this is the way we do it." And I think that that's creating of awareness. What does my system do? Because I pay for it. And we all know money is a big, big incentive to say, "Oh, wow.

Why am I doing this?" And when I did my, my talk in 2022, I did some research and what I noticed is what we do in social media every day. And I had a thing that if the miles from earth to the moon with all the emails we send, inclusive, reply all, the "yes, I'll see you in a minute," all those kinds of emails, there are 12 000 times from earth to the moon with a car on carbon emission.

That's huge. Every single day by every mails we send and that are sent. 12 000 times, so 6 000 times to the moon and back again every single day. That's huge. When I knew that I was going through my newsletters, which one am I reading? Actually reading. Not reading? Sorry, I unsubscribe. And that's only maybe a hundred emails in the year, but still it's a hundred less. So that was for me an eye-opener. But if I had a bill every month of a hundred euros because of emails that were polluting and that I wasn't even reading or even opening,

Chris Adams: Then you're going to think about that, 

Marjolein Pordon: then the awareness would even bigger. So I think that's it. Yeah, so I think that the platforms that are doing that billing are really good. Because that's the best way for awareness.

Chris Adams: Okay, all right, thank you for that. That makes sense, and there are a few cases that, a few of them, I do believe, expose some of these metrics to you like that. At climateaction.tech, one of the communities I run, we use N8N that provides some of this for some of these things, and I've seen similar things with windmill.dev, which also gives some of these, exposes some of these numbers. So we spoke a little bit about the efficiency part. There's also one thing that came up, is, okay, if you're using one platform, for example, there's going to be there'll be things that you cannot change because they are kind of with the provider's decision.

For example, if you're, like one example I can think of is, there's a service called Webflow. This is a kind of low code tool for designing websites. And they run on AWS, who for the last few years have been less ambitious on climate in terms of greening their own supply than say Microsoft or Google, based on like the things that we see in the public domain, for example, and I know there was one example, there was a project called Flowty by a chap called Fershad Irani.

One thing, one thing he basically did was he looked at where you could do this, and because the thing that gets built is maybe a, say, a static website that's created by Webflow, he was like, well, if you've got this, maybe you can move this to a greener provider, for example, and, or maybe you can apply some kind of digital sustainability techniques to reduce the size of the page and do things like that, right?

Now, this was one example of like a low code service, which was like, if you're going through maybe Webflow, for example, you're tied to kind of infrastructure which where, the people providing that are not as ambitious as some other groups, for example, so you're kind of stuck there. There are cases where there are options.

So you can say, "well, I like what you're using, but can you move to another provider?" Or, "If you don't do this, then I will move to another provider" themselves. Maybe you could talk a little bit about like what your options are if you are using some of these tools. Because one of the things I've heard people say about no code or low coding tools is like, "yeah, they're great, but now I'm stuck inside this specific environment where I have no other way of moving away from that."

Maybe you could touch on what are your options if you do want to ask your provider to improve the sustainability further down in the stack, for example?

Marjolein Pordon: Well, what I noticed is one of the big platforms, Mendix, has made it a big issue. And that's because a lot of their clients pushed them and then the majority counts. Then they need to do it because they don't want big clients to walk away. Again, they are part of the chain of big companies, so the ESG legislation is probably also haunting them, which is good. But yeah, vendor locking is a big issue in low code because for example, I have an application built in Java, C#, whatever. The developer that I have or the service that I use or the company that I use, I don't like, we have issues, we part. And I just hire another Java developer, but if I do not like the platform, same with if I wouldn't like Excel or if I wouldn't like Word, everything that I did in there, I need to migrate. And it's not easy. I mean, I could open things in Google Docs, if I went from Word to Google Docs. But still, I could have issues with the outline, with the layout, things like that. So migrating from one platform to another is not easy. And the integration with platforms, like if I had used one platform and then I think, no, I don't want it, but the application can stay there, but I built something new in another platform. The connection is, is really hard because I always say, Lego wants you to use Lego and not K'nex.

So, and maybe you can connect K'nex to Lego, but it won't be easy. It won't be good on usability. So yeah, the vendor locking is definitely a thing. So before you start with a local platform, wherever you need it for, do your research search on, "is this the platform I want now and in the future?"

And not only on, "does it work for my company," but also "what legislations are coming, are they sustainable, what is my client group wanting?" Things like that.

Chris Adams: Okay, so there's not just, so there's, you're talking, there's almost like some, a case of about alignment you need to be checking for, but also kind of influence you might have as well as actually just saying, is this really convenient for me right now, for example. Okay, all right. That's actually quite helpful.

The one thing I can share with you when I was looking through this that other listeners might find interesting, especially if they are developers, there's, we've come across some tools which are open source. They provide kind of low code like environments, but they also allow you to kind of drop down into your preferred programming language.

One thing I've really been quite impressed with is one organization, one project called windmill.dev. So it's an open source, kind of low code platform, but it's more like a... it's a platform where you have visual ways of working, but there's also a way that you can drop into pretty much your own language, or use any kind of docker container.

And that, because the actual platform itself is open, that's one thing, but also the fact that you can drop down into languages that maybe developers might be familiar with, means that you, that reduces some of the lock in to an extent. And I think that's actually quite a promising path to go down, because yeah, you, have that separation that we know in other, in other kind of sectors.

Having separation of different layers does allow for you to have more options on the table. Okay, so can I, if I can, can I just come back to one thing that you spoke about before? Because I was really surprised, and actually quite impressed by the whole thing about saying, "well, okay, we're going to use this as a, as a absolute limit in energy we can use.

So the only way we can do this is by increasing, if we want to grow, then we need to make more efficient use of this rather than just say, we're just going to keep growing as fast as we can, and we're not really going to think about the resource requirements." So we spoke about this idea of, and this is one thing, an ongoing discussion in green software, which is about basically growth and the idea of the rebound effect.

Are you familiar? There's a term called the rebound effect, which basically refers to this idea that if you make something more efficient, you can increase the total usage of this just because it's become more accessible to more people. And one of the key things around tools like low code is that yes, you're democratizing access to computation, but it also increases the number of people who might be making systems as well, which can have some similar effects.

So maybe you could talk a little bit about the conversation and how you've seen that evolve in the Netherlands specifically, because that's somewhere where you have seen, like moratorium on new data centers being built, which has meant that you've had to, it's forced some of the conversations that are probably not happening quite so quickly in other parts of the world.

And this was, yeah, you brought this up at the beginning of the podcast, so it feels like it might be worth just spending a bit more time looking into that.

Marjolein Pordon: Yeah. Because if you look at data centers, we have, I think, three big ones in the Netherlands. And the one I think in Lelystad uses as much energy as the whole of Amsterdam. That's huge. One data center takes up the same amount of energy as the main city of our country. And that's huge. That's crazy if you think about it, because we cannot build at the houses we need at the moment because of the nitro legislation, because there's not energy, there's not enough water, and those data centers use water and energy of a complete city. So if we do not have that data center in the Netherlands, then we could build a complete city of Amsterdam. Think of all the houses we could build. So this is quite a discussion in the Netherlands. Arjen Lubach is a guy who makes, is a television presenter, and he makes those kind of reports on this.

So also to make us aware, because they are built for a part with our money from the taxpayers. So we are aware that it gives jobs, a data center. We need it and that it's good for Google and AWS to be here, but they're not energy efficient. And well, one of the politicians said, we need them to give back because they're here in the Netherlands,

they use, okay they pay for the energy and for the water, but they need to give something back also for sustainability. And what we now are looking into is that they heat water to cool down their data centers. But we could use that water to heat cities with city heating. So then we, then they should make sure that there are pipelines to the city next to the data center. And then the warm water from the data center can flow through the houses and heat them. And then when the water is cooled down, it can go back to the data center and then you have the rebound effect and you can reuse the hot water to heat the houses and the cool water can go back to the data centers. And data centers said, "no, no, that costs too much money." And we are in the Netherlands now working on a legislation that will make sure they have to do that. If you want a data center in the Netherlands, then you need to build it, and you need to build the system to heat houses. And I think that's good because then you're cooperating, then you're working together and making sure that we need the data centers, but they can give back and work together so that we can still have a better environment because if we go on like this, they had, I think, requirements for 2030 in the Netherlands. Well, we're not going to meet them. And then they said, "well, no, but we'll make them in 2040." Yeah. And in 2030, you'll say 2050. We need to do something now. And I think that by making this happen, saying to a big company like Google, "fine, you have your data center, but these are the requirements or else." It's just necessary to do this.

Chris Adams: Okay, that's a very different take that we've seen in other parts of the world when discussing this actually. And what we can do is we can share some links to some of those points because I haven't heard those stats and those numbers presented in that way before actually. Marjolein, I just want to check up.

So we've spoke, we've covered quite a lot of ground. We spoke about like low code and things like that. If people do want to, if they found some of this interesting and they are, they're looking to take some of their first steps into low code, into the set field. Could you maybe just like suggest a few places where people should be looking to either get either learn in their own time with some like training or if there are any particular projects that you would want to draw people's attention to for this?

Marjolein Pordon: Well, for the low code part, most applications have their own playground and learning environments, which are quite good. So I would start there on the low code part. There are not many general courses on low code, but I'll check them after we're done with the podcast and then I'll, we'll add them to the show links. 

Chris Adams: And if there was maybe one platform people might work with or start with or is there one that you would suggest people take some of their first steps with for example or something like that if they're coming in to begin with they just want to start kicking the tires and trying it out, for example?

Marjolein Pordon: Well, I would start with like a Mendix or an OutSystems or things like that, where you have a lot of information and a community behind so that you get the hang of what is low code, what are the standards that you need to work with. And if you have done like one or two of those, then you see the common grounds and then the other platforms will be a lot easier.

Chris Adams: I see. Okay. All right. Well, Marjolein, thank you very much for that. If we're just coming to the end of our time now. So if people have found this interesting and they want to follow what you're doing, where would you suggest people look? Is there a website or is there maybe a pro, is there like, where, where are you online for people to follow your updates and see what you're, see what you're doing going forward?

Marjolein Pordon: I'll follow LadyLowCode at my tag at Instagram and Twitter is @LadyLowCode. LinkedIn is Marjolein Pordon and my website is www.ladylowcode.com.

Chris Adams: Brilliant. Okay, well, Marjolein, thank you so much for giving the, making the time to chat with us today. As we mentioned before, we'll run through this to make sure we've got show note links for all the things that we discussed here. And yeah, have a lovely week, all right? Take care, Marjolein.

Marjolein Pordon: Thank you, Chris.

Chris Adams: 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.foundationon. That's greensoftware.foundation in any browser. Thanks again, and see you in the next episode!

In this episode of Environment Variables, host Chris Adams delves into the fascinating topic of the rebound effect with Vlad Coroamă, founder of the Roegen Center for Sustainability. They discuss how improvements in efficiency can sometimes paradoxically lead to increased consumption, using examples like teleworking and online shopping to illustrate the point. Through their conversation, they explore why this happens and what conditions make it more likely. Their insights shed light on the complexities of balancing technological advancement with environmental sustainability, offering valuable perspectives for anyone interested in building greener digital services.

Learn more about our people:

• Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | Website
• Vlad Coroamă: LinkedIn | Website

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• The Green Software Foundation Website 
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News:

• Assessing the Potential Energy Savings of a Fluidified Infrastructure | Computer [14:40]
• Digitalisation and the Rebound Effect - by Vlad Coroama (ICT4S School 2021) [22:45] 
• A Methodology for Assessing the Environmental Effects Induced by ICT Services | Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on ICT for Sustainability [32:20]

Events:

• ICT4S 2024 [41:36]

Resources:

• Roegen Centre for Sustainability [03:00]
• https://pythonspeed.com/articles/software-jevons-paradox/ [05:36]
• The Coal Question | Online Library of Liberty  [06:34]
• Khazzoom–Brookes postulate - Wikipedia [10:02]
• Sustainability in Computing Education: A Systematic Literature Review
• https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_lET2Yco=/?moveToWidget=3074457359170346418&cot=14  

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TRANSCRIPT BELOW:
Vlad Coroama: When there is rebound, but if your digital service makes the activity sort of more affordable or simply more desirable, and it will be consumed more, but it will have changed in such a way that the footprint of the new activity, the modified one, is much smaller than the original one. And then although you might have rebound, the overall balance will be net positive.

Chris Adams: 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, Chris Adams.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Environment Variables. Where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams. When we talk about green software, the notion of efficiency comes up quite a lot. Take two forms of efficiency explicitly called out by the Green Software Foundation, software efficiency and hardware efficiency.

In the first case, you're talking about how much energy is needed to perform a given amount of computation. And in the second case, you're talking about how much hardware might need to be created by extracting material from the environment, refining it, then turning it into electronics that we run computation on.

In isolation, it's quite hard to argue against efficiency, and we can point to literally years of data showing how increases in efficiency in computing have blunted what might otherwise be eye-watering increases in the amount of energy consumption and other resources we have gone through in absolute terms.

Thing is, efficiency has second order effects too, because making things more efficient can make them more accessible too. Increasing the number of people who can use them. And we can point back to published work in 1865, observing this happen with coal-powered steam engines. So the common term for this is the Rebound Effect. And joining me today to explore what it means for greening digital services is Vlad Coroama of the Roegen Center for Sustainability.

I first came across Vlad's work when at a green cloud procurement workshop in 2019 held by the European Commission in Brussels. And over the years, I've had his writing and presentations about the rebound effect and digital sustainability, some of the most incisive and accessible work on the topic, on the subject.

Before I embarrass him further though, I think it might make sense to give him a bit of space to introduce himself. So Vlad, thank you so much for joining. I've been looking forward to this. Can I give you a few minutes to introduce yourself before we get into the meat of it?

Vlad Coroama: Hi Chris, many thanks for your kind intro, of course, for having me on your program. So I'm Vlad, the founder of the Roegen Center for Sustainability, which is a small company based in Zürich, Switzerland which tries to do a research, actually, more research than consultancy in the field of computing and sustainability, or if you want more from a, more from a deployment perspective, digitalization and sustainability.

Actually before that, this quite recent and before that for my entire life, I've been an academic and I've worked in the fields of computing and sustainability and also the more technical one of smart energy for about two decades now. And with both these hats on, so both with the more sort of hands on engineering system developing hat on, and with the more theoretical hat, what my work, which of course in the beginning, it was not so clear where the path leads to, but it became more and more clear that I want to understand how we can both make computing more sustainable, which is if you want perhaps green IT to use a general term, but also to see, and perhaps in my view, more importantly, to see how we can deploy computing or digitalization again from a deployment perspective, to induce environmental benefits across our societies and economies. So in other sectors, sometimes that it's often called Green by IT and these indirect effects, as you said, it's not only about direct effects, this is very much about indirect effects, are, or can be, so much more powerful than the direct footprint. And unfortunately, it's not only the positive effect. So it's not only how can we do, you know, society and economy more sustainable, by the way, society, societally sustainable as well. We'll talk mainly about the environment today, but much of what we discuss applies to societal implications as well, but to come back, so it's not only positive effects.

We also have, unfortunately, this indirect detrimental effects to sustainability, both societal, I mean, we've seen elections and so on, right? But also environmentally. That is, computing or ICT can induce more energy and material consumption, increased emissions, increased pollution, and so on in other sectors.

And with this, I think we sort of arrive at the topic of our discussion today, which is rebound.

Chris Adams: Indeed. Yes. Thank you very much for that, Vlad. So, just if you're new to this podcast, my name is Chris Adams. I am the executive director of the Green Web Foundation. That's a Dutch-based nonprofit focused on reaching an entirely fossil-free internet by 2030. I'm also the, one of the policy chairs of the Green Software Foundation's policy working group.

And here's a quick reminder, we're going to be covering a few papers and a few projects and links and websites. We have show notes at the end of every single episode, and there'll also be a transcript. So if there's something you miss, we will have that available so you can kind of catch up with this or basically submit pull requests if you see things you need to correct. All right, Vlad, are you good to go? I think, should we start with this? Okay, then. So we spoke about this. The topic of this is Greening the Rebound Effect. And I've touched on what the rebound effect is, but for the uninitiated who want to learn more than what I just said, what is the rebound effect?

And maybe you could tell us a little bit about where it comes from and whether it's a new thing.

Vlad Coroama: Okay. Thanks. So as you said in the introduction, your introduction, the very first time that we know this has been mentioned, it was in 1865 by the British economist, William Stanley Jevons, who wrote a book, The Coal Question, it's called, and it was about what we today call rebound effect, we called it such back then.

And by the way, this is a very cool thing, as a computer scientist, you seldomly get to cite, you know, a paper older than 20, 30 years, so it's really, it's really nice when writing a paper, you know, to cite something from the 19th century. So what Jevons noticed was that the more efficient steam engines and other, you know, coal using machinery was becoming in the 19th century.

At first glance, paradoxically, the overall coal consumption was not decreasing, but increasing and increasing at a very larger rate. So this is not necessarily counterintuitively, but yet it requires an explanation why. And of course the explanation is that the amount of engines was increasing because

the more coal, the more efficient machines were becoming, and by the way, some of these machines were steam engines that were helping in the very coal extraction. So coal extraction itself was becoming more efficient and thus cheaper. So both the running the machines was becoming cheaper and accessing coal was cheaper.

And this means you could deploy the coal for many more machines doing the same stuff that had been done before and for entirely new applications. And this is basically what we now call the direct free buffer, which means a good or a service becomes more efficient because the energy is more efficient or some other material that flows into it.

So it is more efficient to produce that good or service, thus it becomes more affordable. And thus, as we know from neoclassic, since Adam Smith, basically the demand for it tends to increase. So that's the first phenomenon. And this, by the way, lay dormant for over a century and late seventies, early eighties of the 20th century, of course, due to new researchers, Khazzoom and Brookes, 

Chris Adams: Ah, yeah. 

Vlad Coroama: we rediscovered the phenomenon in wave of the two oil crises, was the context.

And basically they talked about the same, about the direct rebound effect. And then this developed also to what we now would call the indirect rebound effect, which is actually an umbrella term for a variety of mechanisms and phenomena. But all have in common that something becomes more accessible in a way.

Some resource is being saved or is being used more efficiently. And that resource can be energy, but it can be any material. But it can also be immaterial stuff, such as time, and this we call time rebound. So if a technology saves us time, we'll do something with that time that likely will also require energy and produce emission.

Or if it saves us money, as before, we might not spend those money on more of the same good. But, and this is called the income effect, and this is another type of indirect rebound effect, we might use the disposable income to, you know, do something else that in itself might be energy intensive and, you know, responsible for lots of emissions.

Chris Adams: Okay. So, so we've got the Jevons. So there's Jevons paradox where it initially started with, and I believe you spoke about Khazzoom and Brookes. I think it's, is it called the posh term, the Khazzoom–Brookes postulate? Something like that. It's like the kind of term you'd use at a cocktail party to impress people.

And then you've also described, there's a few different flavors of rebound that we might talk about, and they might have different degrees of magnitude. And this is something we're going to, we can talk about a little bit later. So in time, you know, if I'm, if I save a bunch of money by buying a bunch of things at, say, a supermarket, a cheap supermarket, I might end up spending a bunch of money either eating out or buying, getting coffee, you know, posh coffee and stuff like that.

So that's, those are the, some of the rebound effects you're talking about. Okay. All right. Thank you for that potted history there, actually. And I didn't realize that it was so much based around the seventies, because presumably that's like relation to the oil crisis and when people suddenly started caring a lot more about efficiency.

Right?

Vlad Coroama: Yes. And actually they saw that and then also a more fuel efficient cars came around also in the U S and, but still the overall fuel consumption, not maybe short term during the, you know, the crazy months of the oil crisis, but over several years, the oil consumption, the petrol and so on was still increasing.

And that's how, so for a similar sort of trigger as Jevons, a century earlier, they started looking at it, how does this happen? And what they saw is people drive their cars more.

Chris Adams: I see. Okay. Thank you for that. And, so when we're talking about things becoming cheaper and more accessible and more widespread. It's not a huge leap of the imagination to think about things like electronics getting cheaper or more widespread, even cloud computing becoming cheap or more widespread.

So I guess maybe it's worth me kind of moving to this. So if we're gonna talk about things like the rebound effect or things like this, or why efficiency gains matter in the context of building digital services, maybe I could actually ask like, why does this matter when we talk about digital computing?

And why does it matter in a world where we are seeing more laws being passed now and a kind of influx of new kind of legislation or people setting new norms about this?

Vlad Coroama: So it, it matters, as you say, of course, this happens within computing as well, or within ICT, let's say, I think it's Koomey's law that, that says,

Chris Adams: Is the network halves every 18 months or something, isn't it?

Vlad Coroama: Yeah, it's that basically we are, or a consequence of Koomey's law, a consequence, not directly Koomey's law, is that we use all our gains for more computing and not for, you know, less energy intensive computing. And this of course makes sense. But the problem I think with computing or what does it mean, the, the big challenge of computing, but also environmentally, what can become an issue is that it's general purpose technology and that it induces efficiency, not only within computing, but also, and crucially outside it.

So we, when we talk about the rebound effect of, again, computing/ICT/digitalization, choose the term that you prefer... we have to distinguish between the rebound within ICT itself, more computing, perhaps, you know, more cloud, whatever, it's more affordable. But crucially, I think also the rebound outside this in all the other sectors that digitalization makes more efficient.

Chris Adams: I see. So there's, so in the context of digital, one thing you're saying is that, yes, there is, obviously we should be mindful of an efficiency argument, but because if you just only talk about efficiency rather than consumption, you can lose sight of the full picture and. If you take a second to step outside, the efficiency that you might see at a kind of digital level could also have like

absolute increases or decreases accordingly. So you should be, so we need to take, we need to be looking at the two of these basically.

Vlad Coroama: Yes, exactly.

Chris Adams: Okay, cool. Thank you for that. That's actually, okay, that's quite helpful. And I suppose when we talk about efficiency, it's worth looking at some of the numbers, for example.

So we have seen, say computing get quite a bit more efficient, but we've also seen, basically, we've also seen, for example, some of the hyperscalers, we've seen hyperscale companies like say Microsoft, Google and Amazon, it's not like they've stayed the same size and they haven't grown.

We ;have seen them growing, even as things get more efficient. So these are one of the things where we need to be somewhat aware of, yes, the absolute figures in this as well as the efficiency part here. And we've spoken about how, there's, digital can have an impact on the outside world, and you might be talking to things like, so like transportation examples or like ride hailing, things like that is what you're referring?

Maybe you could expand on some of those. Cause I think these are the things that I've seen you talk about quite eloquently in other places, actually.

Vlad Coroama: Yes, because there is the hope, right? And very often we have the claims that ICT or digitalization, let's say now, makes so much of the world more efficient by coordinating it better, by, you know, finding patterns, by we all know how Google did its cloud more efficient and so on. But then there are many other fields outside.

And in all of them, I see a pattern of how in the beginning everyone says, or a lot of the voices say, "Hey, great, you know, now we have your efficiency. Now it will be so much better." It's a sort of a techno-utopianism, if you want. I will give two-three examples. The one I will start with this one, I'm writing now actually about the rebound effects of teleworking.

And I've, so I've been reviewing many studies and it's very funny because the very early studies, teleworking has been around long before sort of the World Wide Web made it into the homes. Since the 70s, they started talking about this. And the first papers have titles such as, you know, 'Traffic Reduction by Telecommuting' and then similar things.

And then through the work of Jack Niles, it was, and especially Patricia Mokhtarian in the nineties already, they started to understand, "oops, wait, wait, wait, there is also lots of rebound effect." And today's papers have titles such as, you know, 'Does home-based telework reduce household total travel?' So lots of questions marked there.

You know, does telecommuting promote sustainable travel and physical activity? Does telecommuting reduce commuting emissions? And so on. These all, and I have many more, but I will not go into them. But so the phenomenon that happens there is that, yes, teleworking in first instance, of course, if you don't travel to work and travel is energy intensive, much more so than, you know, the little bit of energy that we consume now to have a call, it saves energy in the sum.

But then, because you have more time, because you are more flexible, you start, and because before you used to do other things while going to work or coming, you used to have multi purpose trips. So you, I don't know, dropping kids at school, you know, going to the gym, doing grocery, whatever. those other reasons still exist.

So you will still undertake other trips and much more so than you have subtle effects. If you only need to commute, say, twice per week to work, you might be very tempted to move much farther away from work, you know, in a nice countryside where the kids can play, you know, in nature and safely and so on.

And then you only commute twice instead of five. Well, four or five times per week, but for much longer distance and perhaps no, you can no longer do it by public transportation because you're not urban anymore, but you have to do it by car. And that's a classic. And this became more and more clear. So teleworking is not clear actually now whether, you know, the net effect is a positive or negative.

And I will not go into this detail for others, but we have this for e-commerce or slash online shopping as well. Again, lots of enthusiasm environmentally in the beginning, and then you see that many other things happen. You know, you, all of a sudden you order much more. It's so easy to order from the couch at 11 pm, you know, you don't need to go to the store. So all the consumption increases, or now more recently with AI, with autonomous vehicles. And this is perhaps the last example I want to give, and I think you've heard this before because it's a favorite example of mine. Also in the beginning, we had lots of enthusiasm, you know, how the cars will like coordinate with each other.

And then, you know, they, at some point we won't need traffic lights anymore. So then don't need to brake and waste energy and then reaccelerate. But this is all peanuts. What actually will happen is that, you know, they will substitute, autonomous vehicles will substitute a lot of public transportation because it will be so much more convenient to be driven by car and be able to work in the car or, you know, read a book, discuss whatever. So use the time efficiently.

Chris Adams: Okay. So you spoke about these, there's quite a few examples then of the rebound effect resulting in basically first in like direct efficiency leading to increases in usage in other ways, with some kind of actually quite vivid examples there. And that's, that feels like a nice segue to talk about, okay, we have this idea around rebound.

And there's different kinds of rebound that can take place. But as I understand it, there are certain conditions that make rebound more likely or increase the effects of rebound versus, making them somewhat smaller, for example. Maybe we could talk a little bit about that because I remember hearing about the kind of like vivid example of autonomous driving.

Like you mentioned, there was, yes, it increases the, it lowers the threshold of you doing things to the point that, you know, there's there's a famous study about someone sending autonomous cars to just pick up a sandwich they left at home because it was so easy to do now. And that's obviously not going to be a sustainability win.

So maybe you could talk a little bit about when you do see rebound and what conditions make it more likely to happen versus maybe when it's not so likely to happen, perhaps.

Vlad Coroama: Yeah, there are, I do not have general rules to provide an answer. So I cannot tell you this precise, you know, class of applications or yeah, digital services are more likely to rebound than the other not. But I can give you a couple of hints or perhaps examples, and the easiest is to start with that, with the example of the vacuum cleaner that you mentioned earlier, and which is of course outside digitalization, but I think it's very nice to understand the phenomenon. When the bagless cleaners emerged to, Dyson was the first on roads to invent them.

They also became so much more efficient. So they used to consume 1.5 to 2 kilowatt of power, and now they are 4-500 watts. So a factor of it's like 20 to 25%, a factor of four to five, reduced power. And the question is, do we vacuum much more? So it is of course, cheaper to run them. Do we vacuum much more?

Probably we do it a bit because, you know, they are also more convenient. They are cordless very often and so it's easier to grab them. But certainly this rebound is relatively small and not, you know, 400% it doesn't overcompensate with certainty, because, well, you only need so much to vacuum your house and it's probably also not the most people... the favorite activity for most.

So one of this thing is when there is something like, when the demand is satisfied,

Chris Adams: Ah, like an upper limit.

Vlad Coroama: not have rebound, you need to not have the rebound mechanism. And this mechanism being often, not always, again, it can be with time or transaction costs or other things, but often it is monetary.

You save money and then you, you know, consume more of that good. And in this case, if the demand is satisfied, then you don't need more. So, for example, smart heating in a home, to come again now back to computing, if you have smart heating, I mean, we used to have our homes up to the seventies, even at 13, 14 degrees centigrade in winter.

We don't do it anymore. We all have whatever 19, 20, 21, wherever we feel comfortable and we don't need more than that. So, a smart heating system will make our, our heating more efficient, then we'll save 10%. And that can be financially quite interesting. We'll not use those money to hit more because there is no need for it.

I mean, we might perhaps, you know, let a bit more fresh air in and thus waste a bit more energy, but it will certainly not compensate the savings. So that would be one such example where at least a directory bound. It is, is unlikely,

Chris Adams: Ah, I see. I'm really glad you mentioned the vacuum one because I remember watching your talk just after I bought a cordless vacuum cleaner myself, and I remember saying like, "okay, there's an upper limit to how clean my flat can actually be." And like, yeah, it's a lot more fun to use, but yeah, I, it doesn't make me... making me slightly more efficient at vacuum cleaning does, it didn't double how much I enjoy vacuum cleaning, right?

Well, I might enjoy it more, but there's an absolute upper amount of vacuum cleaning hours I'm prepared to invest into my flat, for example. Okay. So that's, so there's this upper limit of satisfaction that if you have something like that, that's maybe one kind of hint that you might be looking for, for example, and we might be able to kind of take some ideas into another domain domain for that.

Vlad Coroama: And if you want, I can give another such hint. So when there is rebound, but if you sort of, if your digital service makes the activity sort of more affordable or simply more desirable and it will be consumed more. But it will have changed in such a way that the footprint of sort of the new activity, the modified one, is much smaller than the original. And then although you might have rebound, the overall balance will be net positive.

And again, a short example outside of digitalization is LED lamps, right? There is certainly, once you have LED lamps, there is certainly a rebound in the, in a sort of light rebound, in the amount of light that you're using. You will, because you know, they take six watts and not 60 anymore. You are not so concerned with like turning it off anymore.

So there is some light rebound, but in terms of energy, the rebound is really small because even if you leave it like twice as much, you will still save 80 percent and not 90 percent, but still the net save will be... and the same in digitalization. We did, for example, a conference for it in 2009 between two continents.

And that conference happened at two sites simultaneously in Nagoya, Japan, and in Davos in Switzerland. Of course, it was a seven hour difference, so there was just a four hour common slot in the Swiss morning and the Japanese afternoon. And why we did this? Because for a conference, the main environmental impact are flights of participants to the conference, and in particular, intercontinental flights.

So the hope was to save intercontinental flights. And according to our survey afterwards, we have indeed succeeded to save some, around 80 intercontinental flights of people who would have flown to the other side of the world. And we induced much more, around 200 intracontinental flights. But you know, a short haul flight has such a smaller footprint than a long haul flight that although we had many more participants

and many more flights. Because those flights were much shorter, the overall impact was still positive. And again, we only talk direct rebound here. I like to stress this point. The system boundaries, as they say in environmental sciences, the system boundaries of indirect rebound are basically the words. So it is very, very tough and we do not have yet the right tools to profoundly assess the, you know, the overall impact of digital technologies, unfortunately. And this is one of the areas I'm most interested in.

Chris Adams: I see. Okay. Can we just dive into that a little bit more before we move into the next topic? So you spoke, we spoke a little bit about say, forms of rebound where there's an upper limit where there is, it's like me having a more efficient vacuum cleaner is one thing. And then you mentioned this other thing where there is like,

where you're somehow, where the savings end up being kind of almost somewhat circular. So if I'm, maybe I can reduce, say the cost of cloud computing, you mentioned that in many cases, because I've made it cheaper, I would then recirculate those into doing more rather than actually reducing the total energy use.

Is there anything, have you, maybe you could expand a little bit more on that part, because when I think about things like, say, AI, or I think about some kind of, some things related to cloud computing, we can totally see this, and there are very much arguments basically being made right now, that say, "Oh, well, all you need to do is focus on your cloud bill going down by half," for example, "and then that will be, and that will achieve your savings."

Well, that's what you need to care about." And it sounds like, if I was to focus a bunch of time into halving my cloud bill, I'd then have a product manager or my CEO say, "well, okay, look at all this, look at all this money we've saved. Let's reinvest it into doing more so we can do, so we can have more of a competitive advantage in our particular field," for example.

Vlad Coroama: Yeah, of course, if you want... reducing your impact means always reducing your overall impact and not becoming more efficient. So in a sort of narrow view of what you asked, if your manager came to you and said, "hey, let's be twice as efficient," the answer should be "no, let's overall consume less." This being said of course, it's again, it's very difficult because AI in particular, and AI is the most uncertain domain, as you very well know, or certainly one of the most uncertain how it will develop in terms of energy consumption.

And so it might go through the roof or it might not, you know, and it will depend on so many factors, but it also has, it brings about, and I keep coming back to the indirect effect. Sorry for that. But, you know, you cannot forget them. So I hear very often the argument of sobriety, of digital sobriety.

And of course, it's good because to achieve various, you know, goals, whether they're achievable or not, or any goal, any limit we want to achieve, of course, all sectors have to go down. But then AI can use substantial societal or environmental benefits when it's environmental benefits, and if you can really put your finger on them, then it's easy.

Then you, then it's a no-brainer. Of course, it's worth spending, you know, the additional data center to train our models better. Also, by the way, the energy consumption in our devices for a model inference. Because, for example, I have now a paper under review where we measured a bakery chain in Germany and they deployed AI to predict the demand for bread and thus to reduce food waste and the results show, so we made a sort of a benefit-cost analysis.

And the benefits, energetically speaking, are so much larger than the costs of deploying that AI system, training it, inferencing and so on. So when there is, then it's a bit of a no brainer. Unfortunately, you sometimes have, you know, societal benefit at an environmental cost. And then it again becomes harder because then it's a scientifically non-answerable question, then it's an ideological question, right?

"How important?" Or a value-based question. But to come back to actually your question, because I think I went perhaps a little too far away from that, I keep, I keep bringing the indirect effects because I think they are so underrepresented in the discourse, both academic, but even more so societal.

So your question was about the efficiency of, or could you say it again? Sorry.

Chris Adams: Yes, so the question I'm putting is, say, if I want to reduce emissions, it's very easy for me to just talk about, "look at how much more efficient I can be" if I'm a developer, I often think that, you know, I've, I'm incentivized and I am rewarded by making things more efficient. It feels like, if I just focus on halving that cloud bill, for example, there's a risk that they'll just bring that cloud bill back up again, for example, or bring the environmental impact back up again by using some of the savings to do new things.

So the thing I would need to, things we'd kind of need to be able to do is basically have this notion that, okay, we do need to be on a kind of glide path downwards in absolute terms, for example. We can't just talk about emissions intensity, because this is a common thing that you see being, that's coming up in quite a few places.

And this is something that organizations tend to report now a bit more as a way to avoid talking about absolute figures. But it feels like if we're going to do this, we need to look at absolute consumption, just as much as efficiency. And efficiency is one of the strategies you would use to reduce consumption in total, in absolute terms.

Right?

Vlad Coroama: Yes. Yes. Absolutely.

Chris Adams: Brilliant. Okay. Thank you for clearing that part up. I...

Vlad Coroama: Well, it was more you clearing it... But yes.

Chris Adams: This is part of what we're now doing is we, running through some of these to make sure that I understand it and i, when I'm doing this, I'm basically standing, this is helps me explain it to other people as well. So this is a, yeah, this is totally okay.

All right. So we spoke a little bit about rebound. There's a few different flavors of this that we had. And you touched on this idea that if you just look at one aspect, then you can miss some of the kind of wider systemic issues and systemic impacts. And this feels like a nice kind of segue to talk about some of the other work that you've been doing, because it's actually where I came across some of your other work about trying to quantify the environmental impact of a service across multiple areas, basically.

And I found this really helpful where, when I first read it in 2020, because it found, it provided a somewhat kind of rigorous way to help address the fact that a lot of the time people will overstate either the savings, overstate the damage being done in this, in these areas. And I think the name of the paper was, sorry, it's a bit dry.

It's Methodology for Assessing the Environmental Impacts Induced by ICT Services. But one thing that was really nice about this is you would say, "well, you need to think about how much more efficient something might be, but you also need to think about what kind of take up that might be for something."

So, and all of these things here. So. Maybe I could actually talk to you a little bit about this because it's very, very common to see very, very kind of extraordinary claims about efficiency or extraordinary claims about savings under perfect circumstances. So maybe we could talk about like, when you look at this stuff, are there common mistakes or common kind of omissions to look out for when you see people talking about the savings delivered by maybe a new service, for example, so you can help develop some kind of intuition? Because this is one thing I think we don't really have the language to talk about this right now. And I think one thing that your papers did was actually introduce some helpful terms or some helpful language to talk about some of this.

Vlad Coroama: Yes, in all honesty, I... first disclaimer, we didn't provide a cookbook recipe how to do it and how to arrive at a net impact. Again, system boundaries are the word and we don't yet have the tools for that, but this being said, you can try avoiding the most common and sort of low hanging pitfalls if you want.

And perhaps the most common is that, that you read is, you know, a juxtaposition or direct footprint of a service and the benefits in fitting uses. So direct footprint, which is by definition, it's inherently negative from an environmental perspective, as almost any human activity, and the other side, the indirect benefits.

But then conveniently, and I'm not saying that this is necessarily purposeful, it can be out of naivety or, you know, but it is convenient for getting the indirect negative impacts. So you always have, so I think that's a helpful way of thinking about it. You have the direct footprint, negative by definition, and then you have indirect effects, which are both positive and negative. Ideally, you would try to cover them both. The very sort of high level indirect ones, which are systemic, you cannot cover. But you can at least take care of the direct rebound, for example.

Chris Adams: All right. Thanks for that. So you spoke about, so there's leaving omissions from here. There's one thing I've seen that in a few places, so I've seen like, say, caching services basically say, "well, look how much, look at the savings you've received," for example, without telling you the full amount. And this is something that I think Uber have released.

They've shown, there's now a calculator to see how much cleaner your ride would be if you use an EV car versus another one, but you don't see the absolute numbers, for example. I mean, what's wrong with this? Like, is this a thing that... is this a good idea or should, or if you were to do this properly, like, how would you make this more representative, for example, when you see examples like this?

Vlad Coroama: Well, I don't know those particular calculators. I haven't used them or seen them. But from how, what I understand about them, it's very often a question of baseline or of the counterfactual. What is your counterfactual? If I hadn't used this, you know, for example, green taxi service in your example, what would I have done?

If the assumption, if the baseline is, I would have used, you know, a very inefficient internal combustion engine-powered car instead, then, of course, depending also a bit on the electricity mix of the grid, usually it will be positive, right? The overall impact. But the thing is, it might have replaced public transportation or no trip at all.

And then it's a rebound effect. So if I am keen, you know, I am taking a taxi and you know, it just tells me, "Hey, if you now take the green one instead of this," then I would say it's probably a reasonable assumption. We have some production issues, so from a life cycle assessment, of course, it's a bit complex, than it's probably pictured, but in essence, it's probably not incorrect.

But overall, what happens is that if a taxi ride is cheaper, or if I have what is called a moral hazard, so I have a clear conscious, "oh, I'm going green so that I can take it," and then I'm taking one that would not have existed in the counterfactual, then of course the net effect is there.

Chris Adams: Okay. So that last part is like, I get an Uber or I get an electric taxi and, so I sort of, to a restaurant and I then decided to eat a big fat steak, as an example, like as a way to kind of balance these out. Like there's maybe an indirect, there's a direct saving, but systemically, I still have created more of an emissions. Like, I'm not going to try and do the calculations between steak and a drive, but you get the general idea.

Okay. So that's where some of that comes in. You mentioned this thing called a counterfactual. And I think this is actually one thing that might be quite helpful because we've seen a number of papers and reports being used to talk about how, you know, you can achieve sustainability through AI and we've seen them written in, say, in the early 2010s or even the early 2020s.

And then there is often a lot of interest in talking about how good something could be, but there seems to be less, historically, we've been less good at tracking whether those savings have been delivered. Is this something that maybe you could talk a little bit about that? Cause I remember you write, I saw recently you wrote a little bit about the, this kind of reporting, the fact that there's a kind of gap in how we talk about this and the following through part, maybe you could just follow, just expand on, on this and why you need this, this extra information to kind of see if things are working basically.

Mm

Vlad Coroama: Yes. So for AI, I think it's a bit too early to tell, we have not yet seen like a series or I'm not aware of any, a series of studies or even like one old study that made some predictions and the authors didn't come back to it to say whether anything was delivered on. And I think it's not also a typical, like, computing thing that we do lots of predictions. And as the old adage goes, "predictions are difficult, particularly about the future."

Chris Adams: Yeah.

Vlad Coroama: Yeah So first, you know, when our predictions were right, we might like to go back and highlight this that we were right already back then. And otherwise we might conveniently forget that we made those predictions.

For the computing domain generally and not AI, because again, AI, I think it's a bit too young for that phenomenon to be seen one way or the other, but for computing generally, there is a track record of various, both companies and sort of lobby groups of the IT industry or of the telecom industry doing sort of predictions and then continuing. One very known example is GESI, Global E Sustainability Initiative that published every couple of, every four to five years, starting 2008.

They publish a series of studies. The first one was called SMART 2020, then SMARTER 2020, then SMARTER 2030, and so on. And there are predictions, the first two ones are called SMART 2020 and SMARTER 2020 because they're where to the year 2020.

Chris Adams: Ah, I see.

Vlad Coroama: And and they predicted many gigatons that would be saved through digital technologies.

I think the first one was 7 point something and the second study around 9. 1 or 2. And that's, that's quite a chunk of the sort of fifth of CO2 equivalent that the humankind puts into the atmosphere every year. So that's a very substantial chunk. And if that would have been true, it would have been amazing.

But now, well, 2020 is past, heh, and we published newer studies, but they didn't look, you know, how did this stand up to the test of time?

Chris Adams: Wow. Okay. That's, that feels like quite a gap that we probably should be trying to close. If we're going to be talking about, we're doing research in this and seeing what is going to be effective as time is ticking down. Right. Vlad, that's actually, I really want to dive down in that rabbit hole, but we're coming up to time.

So I'm going to have to be a good boy and try my best to stay inside the time we do have. Vlad, we've covered quite a lot of interesting areas and dived into quite a lot, and I've shared a couple of links. The show notes have series of links to the papers and things like that. If people do want to continue this work or continue following what you're up to, where should people be looking beyond just the show notes of this podcast for example? Is there a website that we should point people to, or do you have a online presence you would direct people's attention to?

Vlad Coroama: Well, anyone, if, I mean, you can post my, a link to my LinkedIn account, if anyone wants to contact, I'd be happy to, you know, to engage in conversation and continuing discussions, this is what I do. So other than this, there is no value that is specifically say on rebound effects of digital technologies.

I wouldn't know of any, but there is, for example, the ICT4S conference. So the ICT4Sustainability, that, that conference that started back in 2013 and where indirect effects of ICT are quite a powerful presence. This year's edition will be end of June in Stockholm, Sweden, and I'm co-organizing with a couple of other researcher.

So, with Mattias Höjer at KTH, with Tristan Brehmer in Lancaster, Charlie Wilson in Oxford, and Dan Schien in Bristol, we are organizing a workshop on this very topic, indirect effects of... called wait, I'm no longer sure what acronym stands for, but something with indirect something. So a workshop on assessing indirect effects.

So there are a couple of venues that are scientifically dedicated to this, but I, there is no unfortunately, no like, you know, portal where everyone has the topic.

Chris Adams: Like Institute of Rebound. Yeah. Okay. And yourself, I understand that there's the organization that you work for. The Roegen, is it Roegen Center of Sustainability? That's the one. Yep. So that's roegen.ch is the place people would look to if they want to see any future publications and research in this field from you.

Brilliant. Well, Vlad, thank you so much. I've been looking forward to this and I have to admit, I'm a bit of a fan boy. I've really enjoyed a bunch of the papers and things you've been publishing over the years, and I really hope you continue to do them because they come up with really nice examples that I can help explain to other people.

So thank you once again. And yeah, hope you have a wonderful week. Take care, Vlad.

Cheers. You're too kind, Chris. Thank you as well. And by the way, thanks for your great work that you and your foundation are doing. So thanks for that as well. And thanks for having me. Cheers.

Cool! 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'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!

In this episode of Environment Variables, host Chris Adams is joined by Rachel Tipton, a full stack developer at Open Climate Fix, to delve into the intersection of AI, green software, and electricity infrastructure. Rachel emphasizes the increasing demand for electricity due to factors like server centers, EVs, and electrification efforts. They explore the concept of carbon awareness and its implications for software development, shedding light on the complexities of optimizing energy consumption and reducing carbon emissions. Through Rachel's journey into coding and her work at Open Climate Fix, listeners gain insights into the critical role of technology in decarbonizing the electricity grid and mitigating climate change.


Learn more about our people:

• Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | Website
• Rachel Tipton: Linktree | Website

Find out more about the GSF:

• The Green Software Foundation Website 
• Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter

News:

• FOSDEM 2024 - Quartz Solar OS: Building an open source AI solar forecast for everyone  [2:23]
• Quartz Solar [15:09]
• Starting a non-profit research lab to help fix climate change ASAP | Jack Kelly [22:52]
• Recapturing early internet whimsy with HTML | MIT Technology Review [42:05]

Resources:

• The Tech Generalist | Rachel TipTon [04:06]
• Women Who Code [04:08]
•  Subak [14:09]
• GitHub - openclimatefix/Open-Source-Quartz-Solar-Forecast [15:09]
• Real Decarbonization: How Oil and Gas Companies Are Seizing the Low-Carbon Future | Tisha Schuller [41:29] 
• html garden [42:36]
• https://sceneries.site/#home [42:49]
• https://github.com/search?l=&p=1&q=user%3Aopenclimatefix+label%3A%22good+first+issue%22&ref=advsearch&type=Issues&utf8=%E2%9C%93&state=open 
• openclimatefix (Open Climate Fix) 

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TRANSCRIPT BELOW:

Rachel Tipton: I think it's really important that people are aware that our electricity infrastructure is going to have to handle a lot more electricity, whether that's going to be like server centers, like computers in different places, but also like EVs. If we're going to electrify everything, we're actually going to be using much more electrical energy in the future because it's going to be replacing those carbon-based fuels.

Chris Adams: 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, Chris Adams.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Environment Variables, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams. When we talk about green software, it's common to start talking about energy efficiency, i.e. how much energy you need to perform some computation, or even hardware efficiency, i.e. how much physical hardware is needed to perform that computation. One idea that is less easy to understand is this idea of carbon awareness, an idea based around the fact that depending on where you are in the world or what time of day it is, the amount of fossil fuel being burnt to power the grid we rely on can change, which means the energy could be greener or less green.

This is because beneath the stack of technology that makes up the internet, there's an entire energy system that is at least as complex as the internet. And if you have visibility into that system, there are ways you can operate your systems at the level above to take advantage of these changing conditions, often to save on carbon emissions, and in some cases to save on cash too, as the price of energy can often change based on the amount of cheap renewable energy being fed into the grid that we draw electricity from.

As I mentioned before, this is an idea that takes a bit of getting used to, and when you hear it from publicly traded trillion dollar companies whose own reported emissions have only grown in the last few years, you may be right to be skeptical about carbon awareness. Now at FOSDEM, the largest open source conference in the world, in February, my guest, Rachel L'Abri Tipton at Open Climate Fix presented a fascinating talk about solar nowcasting, something we'll cover later.

But crucially, as someone who recently switched careers, both into software engineering and into working with grid operators, she seemed a good person to talk to, to learn more. Hi, Rachel. I've given you a bit of context about how we met. But I figured, can I just give you the floor to let you introduce yourself before we start?

Rachel Tipton: Hi Chris, thanks for having me on the show. I enjoyed listening to the other environment variable episodes

in preparation for the show and I think that I'm a convert. So I'm Rachel Tipton, I'm a full stack developer at Open Climate Fix, OCF, that's the shortening of Open Climate Fix, is a non-profit product lab, and we're developing renewable energy forecasts to decarbonize the electricity grid. We'll get more into that later, but I'm really happy and excited to be here speaking about my own coding journey today and my time at Open Climate Fix. In addition to speaking at FOSDEM, I was also part of organizing the energy dev room program that I spoke in, and that was organized by LF Energy.

So I was volunteering for them and I ended up submitting the application for Open Climate Fix to speak. So I then asked if I could present some of the slides

that they I had a plan for us to speak with, because I thought that we should be talking at the conference. I also write a blog called the Tech Generalist.

I only have about three articles in it, but that's something that I've been doing since I started my coding journey. And then I also participate in Women Who Code events with the London chapter of Women Who Code.

Chris Adams: Cool. Thank you, Rachel. And when you refer to LF Energy, you're referring to Linux Foundation Energy, right? That's one of the organizations that was, okay, got it.

Rachel Tipton: It's a small group within the Linux Foundation.

Chris Adams: Okay. Thank you for clearing that part up. Okay. So if you're new to this podcast, my name is Chris Adams. I am the executive director of the Green Web Foundation. Which is a Dutch-based nonprofit, basically focused around the idea of a fossil-free internet by 2030. But I'm also one of the policy working group chairs in the Green Software Foundation Policy Working Group.

I'm also one of the regular hosts of this podcast. Okay. And just a quick reminder, everything we talk about on this show, we're going to link to in the show notes, and there will also be a transcript provided. So if there's something that you missed the first time, there should be something available.

And because this is a software engineering podcast, we also have this transcript and the links, the show notes in markdown form on a GitHub repo that we'll be linking to. So if there's something you missed, or if there's something you feel that you need to be corrected, we do welcome pull requests. All right.

Okay, Rachel, I was going to ask if you're sitting comfortably, but I realized that you're standing where you are in the world. So I guess, should we start? Does that sound okay to you?

Rachel Tipton: Sounds great.

Let's go. 

Chris Adams: All right. Okay. So we've teased the audience with a few kind of geek catnip terms, like solar nowcasting and so on. But before I dive in, I wanted to ask. I know that you grew up and studied in America, but I think you, I think you mentioned that you're calling me from France and you haven't always been a software developer.

So could you maybe expand a little bit about that before we dive into the nerdery?

Rachel Tipton: Yeah. So I'm actually speaking to you, Chris, from Olsene. It's a small village in Belgium near Ghent, for people know where Ghent is, that's the point of reference. I grew up outside of Chicago in a state called Indiana in America, and I've lived and worked in France since 2011. So I moved to France in 2011, and my time is split between Lille, which is a city in the north of France, and then this village in the rural area of Belgium. So we have a big garden and it's quite springish outside today. So we've got a magnolia tree that's in full bloom and it looks really nice. And we've had a lot of rain this year in Belgium, so our basement is flooding. Everybody's basement is flooding here. We've had twice as much rain as we usually get.

Chris Adams: Wow. So firsthand experience of changing climates. I guess. Yeah. You, you can't deny some of that then. All right. 

Rachel Tipton: No, no, not at all. Yes. I think it's important to say that I'm a writer and a maker and for most of my 20s. I made my life decisions based on being able to have time to write and have time to make art. Some of that writing is out in the world. A lot of that writing is probably in some place in manuscripts, but that's like who I am at the core. And so I didn't study computer science or physics or engineering like some of my current colleagues, but I studied English literature and geography. I did have a stats course in my geography study. So that was kind of like the beginning of my exposure to data.

And I got out of university with critical thinking skills and really good writing skills, but no clear career path. 

So I'm an interesting person. I have lots of interests, can talk about many things, I read voraciously, but really up until I decided to shift into coding, I hadn't felt like I had a career of some sort. So I had been, when I decided to try coding, I'd been working as a freelance technical editor and writer alongside teaching English full time at a university in the north of France.

I was also teaching at business schools as well. And I had ended up in France because I wanted to learn French. So that was part of, you know, "I want to be a writer. I think learning a second language would be great." Now that I have, you know, I spend part of my time in Belgium. I'm in the Dutch speaking area of Belgium.

So of course, I've also... 

I speak Dutch now to like a intermediate level. So I think it's that language learning part of myself that actually made it quite easy to start learning coding languages because I understand syntax and I understand patterns within language and that

like, I really love grammar.

Like I love doing grammar exercises and I feel as though solving code problems are to some degree beginning to understand the grammar of a coding.

Chris Adams: Oh yeah. I see 

Rachel Tipton: Remember we have a coding language and then beginning to understand like larger data structures is like beginning to understand like paragraphs that lead to arguments that, you know, that you can build something with your code structure in the same way that you do linguistically with language.

I know not all coders approach coding in that way, but that's the aspect of myself that perhaps made me attracted to learning how to code.

Chris Adams: No, I could totally see that. Like I live in Germany and when I came from England to Germany, one thing I picked up was, well, the way that you can just like bash words together to make longer words. When I first came here, I was terrified of how long all the words were. Then you realize they're just like one word linked to another word linked to another word.

It feels like, "Oh, this is just like jQuery. It's just like chaining," you know? And then when I realized that I was like, "Oh, okay, this makes a lot more sense." So I totally see where you're coming from actually on this, Rachel. So yeah, I'm also glad that it's not just me thinking about this. So yeah, that's reassuring.

Rachel Tipton: Yeah, syntax is really, really exciting. Okay. Yeah. Let's see, like in my story, in the, it was the middle of the pandemic when I decided I need to make a change. I think a lot of people had some sort of... I've talked to people who've had a moment of, "Oh, I need to shift something fundamentally in my life," and for me, it was my job and my career. I loved the process of teaching English at the time. I loved my students. I'd even been able to develop a, like a creative writing class for, at the university where I was teaching. So it was really great to get to teach poetry and short story writing to my students, but everything else outside of the teaching was really draining.

And even though I had time in the summer to do my writing, I was completely burnt out, which I think a lot of people who teach have experienced burnout before. So I was also very, very tired of a myth that I had for myself of being like, needing to suffer to be an artist. I think that was like a holdover from my twenties.

I've talked to other artists who have this. 

Stepping into the 

Chris Adams: artist stereotype thing.

Rachel Tipton: It's the starving artist stereotype. And I think I bring it up because I think it's false. And unless you are a well funded suffering artist, then it's hard to live that artist's life. And so 

for me, I was also looking to make a decent living so that like the environment in which I was making art was a little bit more just like financially stable. And then I didn't feel as though I was like giving my heart to my job and not getting anything back from it. So

yeah, that was the place where I was. So, a friend mentioned coding and I started to just started to research it. Like I contacted two people that I knew who worked in tech and one of

them was really encouraging.

He was like, "you know, the tech space needs more women. You can do it. Like, you'll figure it out. Like JavaScript is not rocket science." I trusted him and then somebody else had mentioned boot camps and this particular friend is a business analyst. So I just asked her to put me in touch with coders that she knew. And so she connected me with

two female coders and then I've talked to them and like through those discussions, I started to be exposed to words like front end, back end, full stack developer, and I had no idea what those words meant. Yeah.

That was like three years ago. It was just a lot of jargon, but I had also, as a technical editor, I had already worked in spaces where jargon was used and I know that jargon means stuff.

You just have to listen to it long enough and eventually it's meaning will clarify itself. It's like being a 

Chris Adams: I'm glad you mentioned about jargon thing.

Rachel Tipton: Mhm.

Chris Adams: Yeah. Because I, I think it's very easy for people to basically say, well, I'm not going to, you know, you can rag on jargon, but in many cases, it's actually a very efficient way to get something across once you've established a context. So I totally understand.

Like when you're using the term "MEAN stack" or 'Jamstack' or something like that, the fact that it means something is way, way, way, way, way faster than us having like another five minute discussion explaining what each letter means, for example, and things like that. So, yeah, I know where you're coming from there.

Totally.

Rachel Tipton: Yeah, it's really, jargon is useful for the insiders, for the outsiders it makes it seem like it's much more complex

than it is. As a technical editor, I specifically had worked for a society of doctors who basically wrote papers on blood diseases, so it's like all of the papers were on bone marrow transplantation and I was editing it.

And there's so much jargon in that space around like treatments and diseases, but with time I eventually understood what they were talking about, just in basic terms I was able to actually write about it and talk about it. And so I had the same approach to the coding space. Like from that experience, I was able to apply that to being in a tech space and be like, "this is just like being with the doctors who, you know, thought that they were really 

Chris Adams: Yeah. It's not special. It's just new. Yeah.

Rachel Tipton: Yeah. Yeah. It's not special. It's just new. And I think if you show up with like a beginner's mindset, I like the idea of like the beginner's mind that's completely clean. You're just there and you're curious and you're learning. It's a really great experience to just move forward with that like confidence and humility at the same time.

Chris Adams: Cool.

All right. Thank you. So that gives us an idea of a potted history of where you were and where you came from and how Python or JavaScript might be a fourth or fifth language in the context, rather than just like a first or a second language in that sense. 

Rachel Tipton: That's how I'd see it. I don't speak Javascript or Python, but I can read it. Yeah.

Chris Adams: Okay.

Rachel Tipton: Yeah. 

Chris Adams: Like Latin, I suppose. All right. Okay. So that's some of the background that you had and you've been working with Open Climate Fix for the last few months or so. So that means like messing around with like Postgres or Python and like working up and down a technology stack, for example, and trying to figure out how to use computers for climate wins.

I found Open Climate Fix really interesting because Dan Travers, who was, he was actually one of the advisors and mentors for our organization a few years back when we were going through an Accelerator Progress program with the Green Web Foundation with Climate Subak, an organization. But I really like what they do and I really like the open approach.

So maybe you could just share a little bit about who they are, what they do, because I think that'd be quite helpful context in some of the discussions about computers, forecasting and how some of this fits and why you'd even care about any of this.

Rachel Tipton: Yeah. So the. Company Open Climate Fix was founded as a non-profit product lab five years ago. Like we just turned five, I think, what did it say, late February. So it was founded in 2019 by Dan Travers, who you've mentioned, and Jack Kelly, who worked for the Google DeepMind project. And yeah, the idea of Open Climate Fix is that we connect people who are doing ML research with the energy sector to help decarbonize it.

And the initial product that we've developed is called Quartz Solar, which is like a short term, like we've mentioned solar nowcasting, but it's a short term forecasting service. And I've tried to make this as simple as possible to explain to someone on the outside, but basically what we've done as like. The way, the place we've implemented the court solar forecast is with the National Grid ESO in their control room. So in the UK, there's funding that's called, I think it's National Innovation Allotment that an organization like National Grid can use to collaborate with an organization like Open Climate Fix to develop technologies that will

Chris Adams: I see. 

Rachel Tipton: reduce carbon emissions.

Chris Adams: Can I just check with you? Sorry to interrupt. You mentioned the national grid. So, and you also mentioned this term ESO. And maybe it might just very briefly, just to kind of give people who may not be grid specialists, what those terms mean. So national grid is the grid operator for all of the UK.

They maintain the UK grid, although they're actually, the company is actually active in more than one place. But this ESO term, maybe you could just unpack some of that cause it might be a bit more helpful for people.

Rachel Tipton: Yeah. So when we say National Grid ESO, we mean the electricity system operator. And what that means is they're responsible for operating the electricity system. So the grid that is getting electricity from where it's generated to people's homes. And they need to make sure that the electricity, that the amount of like electricity that's demanded by homes, businesses, everywhere, and the amount that's being generated is balanced on the grid.

Chris Adams: Gotcha. Okay. All right. Back to where we were. Yeah.

Rachel Tipton: Yeah. From my own learning journey within Open Climate Fix, there's so much that's happening around the grid, but the basics is that, for example, when I turn on my electric tea kettle, the grid is aware that it's giving me power and then it'll be shutting off that power at some point. And like power grids are balancing, are doing these balancing actions and balancing decisions are being made very quickly. And that's how a power grid works in very, very general terms, which is beyond, of course, my expertise, but it's what we work with at Open Climate Fix, which I find pretty cool. So the product that I work on is the Quartz Solar web application, and it consumes data from several APIs, and those APIs are serving a solar forecast. And so National Grid uses the Quartz Solar app, and I'm using this just as an example. There's other, we have other customers that are also using the Quartz Solar application, but National Grid uses it to make like real time balancing decisions. And so what that means is that they'll see how much solar energy is being generated on the entire UK grid.

And they're able to determine whether or not they're going to be using like electricity that's coming from fossil fuels being burned or electricity that's coming from solar.

Chris Adams: Oh, I see. So the idea being here is that because they, if they've got better information to this, then, you... so things like fossil fuels may be polluting and kind of not great in climate terms, but because they're dispatchable, that you can turn them on, they have a degree of controllability. So this helps you kind of balance some of this.

And maybe this is actually one thing that you, maybe we could expand on some of that in a little bit more detail, because you spoke about that some of this is providing some forecasting to reduce the amount of uncertainty so that you don't need to have so much kind of backup fossil fuels ready to kind of ramp up, for example.

And I think when I saw your presentation at FOSDEM, A, the control rooms just look, look exactly like you'd imagine a control room in a James Bond movie to look, but also the, there was this massive honking gray picture of a, some kind of gas turbine. Maybe you could like talk a little bit about that and how that relates to some of this, because I think how, like you mentioned, we just see power going in and on, but there's a whole set of complexity under the stack beneath us that we're not really aware of.

Rachel Tipton: Yeah. So the, the purpose of spinning reserves for a power grid is that you always have turbines that are running. Then that might be a gas powered turbine or a coal powered turbine, but they're at the ready in case energy is needed. So one of the reasons that a good solar forecast is important is that a lot of these turbines are running on the grid and they're just sitting there at 50 percent capacity, and they're also, when they run at 50 percent capacity, it's also 50 percent efficiency.

And they're not generating electricity for the grid. They're just kind of at the ready in case they need to be spun up or spun back down.

Chris Adams: Oh, I see. Okay. All right. So that's not a million miles away from how, like, if you want to have a computer running, for example, even inside a cloud system. Right. You still need to have a bunch of computers, which are still there and they're still idling and they're still generating, they're still generating heat and using electricity and so on, but they're not necessarily doing useful computation.

So the same idea also works at the kind of one level down with like a honking gray coal-fired power station or gas. So even if it's not generating power, it's still emitting just because you need to have some of that capacity ready for it to respond. Ah, okay.

Rachel Tipton: Yeah. And the the benefit of like having an accurate solar forecast is that you'll have fewer of these turbines that are running at half capacity. And you'll be able to make the decision, okay, we don't need, let's say you've

got 20 of them running, this is not at scale, but there's 20 of them in random places running ready to support the grid. You can make the decision if you have a very accurate solar forecast that, "oh, we'll have, let's say 50 megawatts of solar energy that's coming onto the grid. So really we can turn those off." And if they're, if you're confident with your solar forecast, then you can confidently make that decision and you'll be 

Chris Adams: I see.

Rachel Tipton: yeah, you'll be saving carbon emissions and then also the balancing costs of the grid, cause you're not burning fossil fuels at that point.

Chris Adams: Okay. So it's a bit like say if I've got a cluster of machines and I just know that I'm not going to have this much capacity, I can just like auto scale down a bunch of computers and presumably like with a cloud provider, they would switch that off. We would assume they would switch it off or something like that.

But that's kind of what it did. It almost like removing it from this pool of reserve capacity. That's what some of this is doing. And you said one other thing as well, is that just like how computers have like a area where they are, have optimal efficiency. It's the same thing with say some energy plants, right?

So they might not be a very efficient, say 60%, but if they're 80 percent capacity, then they're more efficient. There's a little bit like that, that you, you referred to as well, right?

Rachel Tipton: Yeah, exactly. I won't add any more to that. I also think of it as like, when we work like, for example, a part time job sometimes takes as much energy as a full

time job, but a full time job might be working more, like, it might be more efficient in terms of, like, bringing in income. Like, if you have to go to your part time job every day, you

still have, like, that get up and go in the morning, go to the job.

Chris Adams: Even though there's only that much. Yeah. I mean, even though you only do that many billable hours, you've still got the commute and all the other things, huh? That's actually a really useful comparison. I didn't really viewed it in that, in that way, but that makes it feel quite a bit more intuitive. Okay.

And so this sounds cool. Open Climate Fix has been doing this kind of work for a while. And when I look at the kind of GitHub repo full of OCF's work and speaking to various people, I know there are, there's a very, very kind of high nerd count over there. So presumably there'd been some calculations around like the annual savings or what you could achieve with this.

Because I understood that when I first, when I first saw kind of Jack doing some of this, Jack Kelly, I remember him writing these blog posts saying, "oh, I'm, I'm leaving Google. I want to work on climate change. I'm trying to figure out where I should spend my time." And I think one of the, I remember reading a post where he basically said, "well, I think this is the most effective thing I can do using my specific set of skills."

So presumably there's some number about the savings that could be delivered or that are being delivered by something like this, right? Cause it's been going for a while. Yeah. 

Rachel Tipton: Yeah. So, our back of the envelope calculation, which is what we call it, is the back of the envelope calculation, is that the operation of our solar forecasting live service, Quartz Solar, in the National Grid Control Room, saves about or decreases like UK carbon emissions by 000 tons per year.

Chris Adams: Wow. That's not bad for a team of... You're not really a big team, are you? There's like 

Rachel Tipton: No, we're around, well, around 12 people. So less than 10

people. 

Chris Adams: Wow. That's, that's pretty impressive.

Rachel Tipton: For me, getting to work on a project like this that can like say how it is impacting carbon emissions or decreasing carbon emissions in a large scale way, not just by like using electricity from like solar in my home, but actually seeing that like the energy transition requires that our infrastructure changes and how we operate our infrastructures.

Yeah.

I 

Chris Adams: Cool. 

All right. 

Rachel Tipton: Yeah, it's impressive. I don't know what percentage of UK CO2 emissions that is per year, but that's the amount that we're calculating.

Chris Adams: All right then. Okay. Thank you. So, so just to record some, some kind of, okay, forgive the term grid choreography, you can actually achieve some of those savings like that. All right All right. So, okay. We've spoken a little bit about OCF and we spoke a little bit about some of the grids and how some of this works.

Now, I know that where one thing that, one thing that's kind of key in the Green Software Foundation is that there's a lot of open source code, because this is one of the ways to increase reach. And also in my organization, the Green Web Foundation, we have a similar kind of take on open. And like you folks, you literally have open in the name.

And if you're coming into, switching into a new field, it can be a bit scary working in the open to begin with. So maybe you could just touch on some of that first, before we dive into some of the specifics about this Quartz thing, because so far we've been speaking about open source and things like that, but there was a really, really cool demo that you shared that I...

I think we have to stop teasing people soon and dive into talking about.

Rachel Tipton: First I'll, I'll talk about our, our approach to open source and then the Open Quartz Solar Forecast itself. So the intention is to have as much of our code and data available to anyone who wants to work on decarbonizing the power grid or, I don't know, use the code for other as well.

Last year, we had some mentoring from someone who works in the open source space and they explained the concept of coding in the open versus being an open, like a thriving open source community. And right now we're in that space of transition of trying to offer a pro like a product or a tool, which would be the open source, Open Quartz Solar Forecast that people in the coding community can contribute to.

So I feel as though I started my coding career coding in the open. So someone can go to the, I think it's the Quartz front end repo on Open Climate Fix and see the code for our next JS app,

which is the Quartz solar app. But to actually run that app, you can see the API that we're using, but you'll have to like set up your own database to be able to use that.

So it's not readily runnable, I would say, but it's out there. So if somebody wants to take it template for their own application, they can use it. So I, what I've said is like the, the code for my career is out in the open, it's the good, the bad, the ugly. There's a lot of

commits where I'm just like fixing linting errors and that kind of thing. But it's also nice because then I can point to those repositories when I'm applying for other jobs, or people can see that I've contributed to 

an open source project and I personally love the community aspect of people collaborating on code. There's something really beautiful about that collaboration to me and that the community ownership of the code itself.

And so, the idea of Open Climate Fix is that we're providing code that other communities can use or creative people, smart coders who want to certainly implement like an ML model, we're showing them how to do that. Like if you want to implement a large deep learning model. Yes, an individual might not necessarily have the, the data infrastructure to do that, but they can see how we're doing it. And we're giving them those tools. Could be something interesting to add, the energy sector was like one of the first sectors to digitize, I think like in the 70s and 80s. And so some of it's like digital infrastructure is a little bit dated, let's say. Like the

images that you saw of like the control room.

It looks like older digital infrastructure. And so there's this other element to the, like, intention behind Open Climate Fix's work, which is to provide like an upgrade to that digitization for the energy sector. I don't know if that's clear, if that makes sense, but that's one... 

Chris Adams: That does make sense. Cause we did an interview with some folks from Electricity Maps and they, they provide like universal APIs across bunches of countries. And some of the things they had to do, I think when I was speaking to Tony Van Sweet, who were telling me about it, I think it's in Singapore.

They need to, because they can't get actual data. They need to basically use optical character recognition on a image that gets updated every five minutes to pull a data point out. Because you just have a system that was designed a certain way and that's how it's been like that for however long. So yeah, I totally understand where you're coming from with that.

Okay. So we spoke a little bit about this and you spoke a little bit about working in the open and about how there's a difference between coding in the open and having like an actual open source project that kind of gets people involved and things like that. I figured, can we talk about the demo now and some of the things you shared at FOSDEM because that was super cool.

Rachel Tipton: Yeah. I ran in this morning to see like what the, if I had like a solar panel at my house, like what the solar generation would be. So what we presented is it's called Open Quartz Solar Forecast, and we have a repo for it on the Open Climate Fix GitHub account. And basically what it is, it's a, it's a solar forecast that is site specific. So if you have a latitude and longitude coordinate, you basically plug that in to the, the model itself, it's a Python package. So you install the package and then you run the function. I think it's like run forecast and you put in your, the lat long coordinates for your site, as well as a timestamps, which will be like

the initializing null of the forecast, Like right now. And then. It generates a forecast, we call it the 15 minute forecast resolution. So you'll have data every 15 minutes out for 48 hours for your solar forecast in a specific location.

Chris Adams: So when you were presenting this, so you mean you're, you're speaking to me from Belgium and you presented this in Brussels, but the national grid is based in the UK. So the, the coverage for this is, it's not just one country. It's, could you maybe talk a little bit about that? Cause that was the thing that really surprised me.

This is why I didn't realize it was possible, actually.

Rachel Tipton: Yeah. So to explain a little bit about the site specific forecast, it was initially developed by using, we had like a thousand different sites around the UK that the model has been trained on. And the idea is that it takes in numeric weather predictions, like those are the inputs, is the actual local PV data, and then also numeric weather predictions. And it'll create a solar generation prediction for that specific site. For like the machine learning nerds, the actual model itself is a gradient boosted tree, which is like a bunch of decision trees making decisions together. That's the extent of my talking about the model itself. It's been trained on UK data, but it can be applied then to any other like, lat long coordinate in the world.

Chris Adams: Yeah This was the thing that was really cause I think you were presenting with, I think it was Zach, Zach Watts, who,

wow, his hair is way longer than his profile photo when I saw him in person I was like, oh wow, so I can use this in Germany, or you can use this in India, you can use it somewhere else.

That was like super exciting for me because the idea that you could just run that on your own laptop to do that was, yeah, pretty freaking cool when I first came across that actually.

Rachel Tipton: And I like to see it as like a distillation of our, the technology and the research that's gone into developing a... like a solar forecast nationally in the UK down to specific sites that might be like a solar farm or like maybe an energy trader wants to have information on a specific site. And then that gets like crystallized down to four lines of code for someone that wants to generate a solar forecast for their home or any other like location. In the world, and it can be interesting because you might actually like run the forecast in a location to see if it would be useful to have solar panels there. For example, that could be a use case that you use.

Chris Adams: And there was one thing that I found quite interesting, is that we've got this whole shift to basically renewable energies. That's the kind of generational as it were. And we've also seen that I believe in various areas, like say subcontinental Africa, or even India, you're seeing an uptick in people adopting new forms of power, basically, or solar, for example.

And this feels like this is something that you could see these tools being applied in new other areas, which where there's, where you're seeing new sources of demand, new sources of load that needs to be served, for example. And like, essentially that you've got something a bit like a kind of, leapfrogging effect, like you mentioned before, like, okay, there's antiquated technology, but theoretically say in, I know India is actually one country where that you folks have been doing some work already, and there's a bunch of really interesting work using even just like kind of grid modeling tooling to actually see how you can get, get off fossil fuels.

This feels like some, it's almost like a kind of leapfrogging at that level over there. You've got the same access to, to these tools in other parts of the world as well now.

Rachel Tipton: And I think it's important to offer a tool that's easily usable and easily accessible, and then it could also be like connected to other sources of like, what are called, it's called numeric weather prediction. So it's not as accurate as our, like national solar forecast, which uses satellite imagery, but it is fairly accurate.

And I think in most cases, in many cases, it's like something is better than nothing. Balancing a power grid. It's good to have like a super, super accurate solar forecast, but having something that would give you an idea of like how much solar generation you would have in any location in the world is really useful.

Chris Adams: Okay, cool. Thank you for that. So you've explained this, so a Solar Quartz open source. We've got a link to that and we'll add it into the show now. So people who are curious or want to try running their four lines of code wherever they're in the world, just to kind of get their, their own forecast, they can do that.

If anyone has really enjoyed the episode we did about Wasm, there's an issue to see if there's a way to turn some of this into Wasm as well, because there's a bunch of Python and there's a bit of like using C++ inside it. But if you do know Wasm, there is an issue open that I opened because I figured, "well, browsers can do this.

So why not just make browsers able to do kind of solar forecasts?" So maybe that might be of interest to other people. So we spoke about this part here, and this is a chunk of this is talking about reducing the amount of spinning reserves you need to have. Like we're just going back to just some of the grid stuff and like back to this whole idea of like carbon aware.

The thing that you told me was that can most of these tools reduce the amount of spinning reserves that you might need for this. And that means that that's, you're kind of reducing the amount of generation you might need to meet demand. All right. Now that's, as I understand it, one of the key ideas around carbon-aware programming is, as you said, it's attacking the problem from the other side.

So rather than actually balancing out supply and demand by just creating new generation from fossil sources, there's this idea that you could, you know, balance this out by reducing the amount of demand you have as well. And I understand that this is not a new concept inside grids. Like people have been doing stuff like this for a while already.

And as someone who's has basically switched into technology and then also working with the grid, there's a bunch of things which are quite counterintuitive. So the question I have for you is that when you're thinking about like grid responsiveness and flexibility, are there any kind of rules of thumb or things you found counterintuitive that you might want to share with other people to kind of help them think about this, honestly, quite new and quite a bit of a complicated concept to kind of internalize?

Rachel Tipton: So something that was complicated for me to understand in all of these discussions is that we're talking about decarbonizing the grid, but there's not a lot of discussion around like minimizing consumption that's something to be aware of is that when we're talking about decarbonizing the grid, we are not necessarily talking about using less electricity or using less energy in general.

So that was something that was not necessarily hard to wrap my mind around, but I think it's an important point to just put out there because a lot of the conversations are around more developing grid technologies where we can connect more renewables, but that we would still be able to consume as much energy as we do, for example.

But in terms of like, what is it, carbon aware programming, I think that it's the way that I thought about this that was useful for me is that I have the use case of balancing a power grid and using a solar forecast to make those grid balancing decisions. And then for an individual or on like a smaller scale, if somebody has what are called flexible assets at their house, so they might have like a battery or a solar panel, they might have like a tiny wind turbine or something that's generating electricity, having a solar forecast in that setting is a little bit different than having it making decisions on the power grid, but it's still sort of a decision making and energy balancing tool that you might be using in your home. Not sure if that answers your question.

Chris Adams: That does help, I mean, because basically we're still trying to figure out a lot of the wording for this stuff. And we do, we know there's a shift from essentially having a grid, which is basically responding to load. You can have a grid, which basically always meets any demand by just creating more generation.

And there's this idea that now you could shift the use of power from certain places to where to a certain time. So like you mentioned for yourself, if you've got something like say, local generation of say renewable energy, for example, if you're able to store some of that, then being able to run off some, some of that, instead of having to draw from the grid later on at times of high carbon intensity, that counts as a climate win, for example.

And I think these are the things that we don't really have ways to really talk about yet. Or there are some papers exploring some of these ideas, but they're not particularly in the mainstream yet, I suppose. So I think this is something that we are trying to struggle with. And also when you see it coming from a number of large organizations, it does give this impression that, It can kind of almost allow people to not talk about absolute amounts of load.

And when we have seen massive new amounts of load coming onto the grid, especially with data centers, and we're seeing extremely aggressive projections and total energy use. You can see why people would be skeptical about some of these ideas, but I kind of feel that we're aware that this is happening outside of technology, that the idea of responsiveness to the grid is something that happens outside of technology as well, and has been going for a while.

And it's not like a totally new concept, basically.

Rachel Tipton: I think I have two things that I'd like to add to that. One is the idea that like, so there's certain technologies that will inform a user when renewable energy is on the grid. And so some people are using the grid in those moments when there is renewable energy, and I think that there is the potential for individuals to create change, not by just having flexible assets at home, but by saying, I'm going to demand energy and use energy when it's renewable on the grid, and then the grid operators and the energy ecosystem itself, I would hope would then respond by providing more renewables on the grid. I'm talking in vagaries, I feel like in generalities, but that would be one way to shift the, the type of electricity mix, I guess, as you call it on the grid. But then also from the other side that people, I think it's really important that people are aware that our electricity infrastructure is going to have to handle a lot more electricity, whether that's going to be like server centers, like computers in different places, but also like EVs, everything, if we're going to electrify everything, we're actually going to be using much more electrical energy in the future because it's going to be replacing those

Chris Adams: Yeah. Fossil fuel energy. Yeah. heat pumps instead of burning in a furnace, for example. Yeah.

This is one thing that I kind of like, just, I realized recently, actually, is now that lots of places which are taking on, for example, in Germany, right. We see a load of heat pumps being rolled out, especially, I believe you're seeing this in France and Belgium.

And these are places where we don't normally have aircon, right? And if you're listening in a place which uses aircon, the idea that like we've never really used aircon is kind of mind blowing. And now there's going to be a bunch of us with heaters, which can also cool things down. And like, like you mentioned, there will be a whole load of new energy being used because this is the only way that you can provide heat or cooling without actually having to burn fossil fuels.

So we are going to seeing a bunch of this. All right. We've totally gone down a bit of 

Rachel Tipton: Yeah. Gone down a deep rabbit hole that we don't have time to elaborate,

Chris Adams: So I'm going to park that, but I'll share a couple of links. So we're just coming up to time and I just wanted to provide a bit of space to let you talk about like what, what's catching your eye that you would like to draw people's attention to.

So normally we talk about open source projects or maybe a magazine or a video or anything like that. Yeah. If there's anything that you would point people to who might have found this conversation interesting, what would you like direct people's attention to? Because yeah, now's your time, basically.

Rachel Tipton: So off the back of this particular conversation, there's a book called Real Decarbonization by Tisha Schuller, and it talks about how the energy transition is going to involve oil companies, Shell, BP, these large entities. And I feel like if people are involved in the energy transition, it's a really useful book to read, even though you might not agree with everything that she's saying and everything that she's talking about. One of the, the projects that has caught my attention lately, that's more, it's my artistic side. It came from an article in the MIT technology review called recapturing the whimsy of the early internet. And it's a movement called the HTML energy movement. I don't know if you've talked about it before on...

Chris Adams: Never heard of this. Wow.

Rachel Tipton: Yeah. So it's people who are making these HTML energy sites and they say, basically, they're celebrating the rudimentary character of HTML as a language, which I know a lot of people don't necessarily consider HTML to be a programming language, but they are pitching themselves as hidden gardens on the internet.

So I've listed a couple of links to those websites that are very, very relevant. Very minimalist in some sense, but sort of artistic places to poke around and see what is being offered. So there's one called HTML garden and then terrarium of many sceneries from the MIT technology review, which I find to be a good source of information about tech that I wouldn't necessarily be exposed to at my workplace.

Chris Adams: Okay, cool. So that was htmls.garden and sceneries.site. These are two examples of this kind of HTML garden or HTML energy sites. I'd never heard of that at all. Wow. Cool.

All right then.

Rachel Tipton: Might be a bit off topic, but they're kind of fun to explore.

Chris Adams: All right. Thank you for that. Okay. So if people have enjoyed this conversation and they want to follow on some of the work that you have, where should people look? I mean, Rachel L'Abri Tipton is a relatively strong name for Google, right? It's not like Chris Adams or, you know, John Smith, for example. So should we just be looking for Rachel L'Abri Tipton on LinkedIn or GitHub or where, where would you direct people to?

Rachel Tipton: Yeah, so I have my LinkedIn is Rachel L'Abri Tipton, GitHub is also Rachel L'Abri Tipton, and then I have a sub stack that I write, which is the Tech Generalist. So you can also find me there and I've provided just my Linktree for the podcast notes. So all of those links are in the Linktree.

Link tree Yeah. And then also wanted to just pitch a small pitch for myself. My contract with Open Climate Fix is ending at the end of April. So I'm open to new opportunities currently, whether that's in the energy space or other places, or just collaborating on projects. So if people want to reach out, I'm more than happy to talk full stack developer opportunities.

Chris Adams: All right. Brilliant. Well, Rachel, thank you very much for your time and explaining some of the inner workings of how. Basically grids work at a national level and yeah, I hope your basement gets sorted out with the flooding and...

Rachel Tipton: I hope so as well. 

Chris Adams: Yeah. And have a lovely week. All right. This has been fun, Rachel.

Thank you.

Rachel Tipton: Yeah. Really fun. Thanks, Chris.

Chris Adams: 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 week, Chris Adams is joined by Asim Hussain and Anne Currie for an engaging chat on the present and future of legislation around AI and Green Software. Our guests share their hot takes on various topics such as the usefulness of proxies in measurement. With backgrounds in climate and tech, and a future full of green energy, they share their insights into what we might expect, and hope for, from the future. 
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News:

• Sustainability, a surprisingly successful KPI: GreenOps survey results [05:36]
• Cost as a Proxy for Carbon – the inconvenient truth | Kainos [13:41]
• Technology Carbon Standard [25:11] 
• Executive summary – Electricity 2024 – Analysis - IEA [32:15]

Events:

• Carbon Hack 24: Where measurement meets innovation, and impact knows no bounds [44:51] 

Resources:

• Amazon.com: Building Green Software: A Sustainable Approach to Software Development and Operations | Anne Currie et al. [02:20] 
• State of Green Software [06:25] 
• https://stateof.greensoftware.foundation/survey/ [06:30]
• GitHub - Green-Software-Foundation/green-software-maturity-matrix: A green technology self-assessment tool for organisations [14:48]
• Why we should be intentional about the mental models we use for thinking when we think about digital sustainability |Chris Adams [23:52]
• Options to make software greener without changing the code, and how to remember them | Chris Adams [23:58]
• Nuclear? Perhaps! | Volts | Fanfare [37:37]
• JRC Publications Repository - Energy Consumption in Data Centres and Broadband Communication Networks in the EU [38:56]
• https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7165707074901934082/ 

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TRANSCRIPT BELOW:

Anne Currie: AI is eating the world, and it's incredibly requiring of energy. But I'm also going to come back to something that all three of us have said previously, which is, "does it matter if AI uses huge quantities of energy but it's all green?" Then it doesn't matter. And it's not, and that energy isn't necessarily being used for other things, because nobody wants it to heat their home in wherever it is, the middle of nowhere, where we've put our data centers.

Chris Adams: 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, Chris Adams.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Week in Green Software, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams. This podcast, Environment Variables, was initially set up as an example of what you might call pun-driven development between myself and Asim Hussain, back when we were both organizers at an online community called ClimateAction.tech. And, to be honest I kind of missed our chats, so I got in touch with him and asked if he'd like coming back on the podcast and talking about what he's been up to at the Green Software Foundation and I was very happy when he said yes. And likewise, Anne, our other guest today, she's been a fixture in green software for a while and has actually been working in the community working group as well as working on a book about green software called, unsurprisingly, Building Green Software.

It's nearly out, so I figured it was nice to kind of chat to her as well. So, that's what we're looking at today. Anne, Asim, lovely to have you on the podcast again. For people who've never listened to this podcast, can I give you the floor to talk about it? I'll go with you first, Anne, because it's alphabetical, and then I'll hand over to Asim.

So, yeah, Anne, the floor is yours.

Anne Currie: Hi, Chris. Thanks for that. My name is Anne Currie. I am one of the community co-chairs of the Green Software Foundation. I'm also the CEO of a training and consultancy company in green software called Strategically Green. And as Chris said, things that I'm doing at the moment, I've been writing the last year, I've been writing with, with two co-authors, also from the Green Software Foundation, Sara Bergman and Sarah Hsu on the O'Reilly book, Building Green Software, which will be out next month. So that's all very exciting.

Exciting. It's very exciting.

Chris Adams: Okay. Thank you, Anne, lovely to have you back. And Asim, I'll hand over to you as well, actually.

Asim Hussain: Thank you Chris. So my name is Asim Hussain. I am now a full time, the executive director of the Green Software Foundation. I'm really excited to be here again. What are the things I've been working on recently? Just keeping the Green Software Foundation running, has been basically my main activity. But the other thing I've been really heavily involved with is one of our projects which is called Impact Framework, which I'll probably mention a couple of times because it is completely on my mind 24/7.

Sometimes I'm asleep and I'm dreaming of it. If I'm getting my kids to sleep, I usually have the GitHub pull requests open and I'm reviewing them. So it's on my mind constantly. So yeah, that's me.

Chris Adams: Thank you, Asim. Last time you were on this podcast, we were talking about the wonders of fungi and the, the carbon fixing powers of mycelium. How are the mushrooms doing?

Asim Hussain: My mushrooms don't, I've not been doing too well. I seem to have lost my mushroom green thumb. My last attempt kind of really failed in a very moldy way, but I have some new ones growing them from scratch again. So I'm going to give that another go.

Chris Adams: Well? Okay, I guess. Do you say green thumb? I wish you green thumbs or brown thumbs, or what's the color correct color? For? For, for fungi? Yeah.

Asim Hussain: Well, you probably, you just like to have that, that mushroomy smell. That's the way you test it.

Chris Adams: I wish you lovely, mushroomy smells in your future then, Asim. Alright, okay. Hi folks, and if you're wondering who I am, as I mentioned before, my name is Chris Adams, I am the executive director of the Green Web Foundation, which is a non-profit based in the Netherlands, focused around meeting a fossil free internet.

By 2030, I'm also one of the co-chairs of the policy working group inside the Green Software Foundation and a regular host on this podcast. So if you're new to this podcast, what we do in this kind of format is The Week in Green Software, we look at some of the stories that we thought were interesting that we might want to share with other people to basically give an idea of what's happening in the field and in many cases, get lukewarm or hot takes from our guests on the day.

And I think that's pretty much it. We will share a link to every single story. And like we mentioned before, the transcript and the show notes are both available at podcast.greensoftware.foundation. But we also will link to a GitHub repo. So if there's a typo, or if there's a mistake, or there's something you'd like to link to, then you can also open a PR.

And we do accept PRs, so that we've got a useful record from other people who are trying to learn more about green software as well. All right, Anne, Asim, I'm assuming you're sitting comfortably, right?

Asim Hussain: Or somewhat, I bought a meditation chair recently. I'm sitting cross legged at the moment.

Chris Adams: Asim, I'm going to hand over to you for the first story because this is actually one thing that takes me back to some of our Climate Action Tech Days, the very, very early 2020s. So this is a story, Sustainability, a surprisingly successful KPI, this is the Green Ops survey results, we'll share the link to it, but the short version is, and the headline is basically, "if you want to save money in enterprise, turns out that sustainability as a KPI is more important than cost." This is one of the key findings of the recent GreenOps survey that was actually part funded by the Climate Action Tech Mini, Mini-grant fund that was running through this.

I find this quite interesting because it's, well, this is the first time I've seen a survey, which is actually scaled out like this. And I suspect there's gonna be some takes coming from this. So, Asim, maybe if I hand over to you first and then Anne, I'll let you come in and then we'll see what goes on from there.

Yeah,

Asim Hussain: Well, yeah, and this is really interesting. And I think it reminded me as soon as I read it, it reminded me of, do you remember when we ran the State of Green Software? We released it last year. We did a big survey with it as well.

One of the questions there, I, I, I still come back to it because I think it's very interesting. We ask people to rank in order of importance, cost, performance, sustainability, reliability, and security. So you actually, you couldn't just say, you have to actually literally drag and drop these things in the order of importance that you thought it would be. And I thought it was really interesting because the number one item that came out was security, which is interesting, but also very valid and it is, I suppose, you know, what a lot of people and organizations do you focus on. Second was reliability, which is, you know, understandable as well. Third was sustainability. And then came performance and the last, the very last item was cost, which was fascinating to me because to a lot of people, they would assume that cost is the most important thing. And there's something, I remember the researcher at the time, she talked about this concept. I think it was called onstage and offstage when you give information. Like if you're like, if you're on stage and someone asks you a question, you're going to say, "Oh yeah, cost! Yeah, cost is the most important thing to, yeah, we'd love, I love saving costs.

I love also, you know, getting promoted at the end of this quarter," but like off stage, and I think this is interesting, I think off stage, when you really ask people, when they know they're anonymous, when they know they can be truthful regarding what it is, I think this speaks to the fact that to a lot of people, sustainability is important and they do think it's more important than cost. And I think, I don't know how we can kind of get this circulated in such a way, and I suppose this article is doing a good step in that, like, how do we get this circulated in such a way that people understand, like, you know, this is important.

Anne Currie: One of the interesting things here is that all of these things are very aligned, aren't they? That being sustainable does cut your costs and it does improve your security because an awful lot at first stage of being sustainable is to turn off machines that you don't really need anymore. And those machines are your security holes. So, you know, there's a massive alignment between security and sustainability and resilience and sustainability as well. You know, the resilience of auto scaling rather than the resilience of hot backups or cold backups, it's more resilient and it's more efficient. So it's kind of like all of these things are highly aligned, but I guess it all comes down to that whole thing about extrinsic versus intrinsic motivations, isn't it? That people like to feel that they're doing good at the same time as they're doing other things.

Chris Adams: Well, there's actually, there's also a bunch of research that, I think the correct kind of term in psychology kind of jargon is this value perception gap, where everyone basically thinks that they're, they might care about sustainability, or they might care about fellow, they don't think everyone else does, so therefore they're going to self censor and say they don't actually care about this so much, or they'll talk about the thing that, as Asim mentions, makes them more likely to get promoted, for example, or something when they're on the stage like this.

The thing that we've done, Asim, I'm really glad you mentioned the State of Green Software report. I've shared a link to that and also the survey data that we had there. This story in particular, this GreenOps one in particular, the actual underlying data is available for anyone who wants to do any kind of research themselves.

And I think there's a couple of really interesting other things that came out of this, is that there was this idea about, if you look into the story, it talks a little bit about where people need to feel support for example like from the c-suite what are the kind of pre-determining things in order to you to provide some of the kind of cover for this there's a bunch of other stuff inside this that's worth a look actually so yeah I thank you both for like your actually quite warm takes today about this. This is quite cool.

Asim Hussain: But I think it's all about motivation and that's really what this is all about. It's not like what is actually the right thing for you to focus on in software. It's more a question of what am I motivated to work on? Like one of the things in the early days of this whole space is like, well, cost is important, but people aren't waking up in the morning going, "Oh, Today, I want to reduce, you know, annual turnover expectation by 0.02%. Like, and that's, what's motivating me today." It's important to whoever needs to do it. But what motivates people is actually, "I want to do something." This is important to me that, that actually reduces some of the emissions of my software. And I'm going to work a lot harder on that than I am on reducing costs by 0.

2%.

Chris Adams: Yeah I guess maybe some people are, I don't know, I mean, maybe we'll come to the day where someone says "do you know what? I just really like returning value to shareholders." Like, that is what, maybe that's a thing. I mean, they, presumably they... but, yeah.

Anne Currie: Well, I'm going to come in with hot take number two, actually, because I had a very interesting story this week, which is very related to this and that security being the number one motivator. If people actually acted on good security practice, it would massively cut carbon emissions. The going through and closing off all the machines that you really know you need to, if you did a proper security review and you close off all your old machines that you weren't using anymore, that would be a really good security move, would also massively be more sustainable.

But not only that, I heard a very interesting tale this week from a company that wishes to remain anonymous. They did a security review a couple of months back, which, which was about identifying and turning off effectively, well, not zombie services, but services they knew they didn't need anymore. And as part of doing that, the security team identified a machine that was running at 100 percent CPU. So they thought, "well, hang on a minute, that's been hacked. You know, someone's binding Bitcoin on this." They handed it back to the ops team and said, "what's going on here? Sort it out." The ops team took a look at it. It turned out it was running a load test that had been, that, that had been turned on three years previously and never, never turned off.

So the security review identified the problem as fundamentally a cost problem, but, but more than anything else a sustainability problem. So if you do security reviews, it's actually one of the best things you can do for being greener, because you, you just stop doing stuff you shouldn't be doing.

Chris Adams: And I think I'm going to need to share a link in the show notes to the meme saying, You cannot have a cluster if, if you don't have a cluster, because that seems to be a kind of reference to some of this here. Okay, thank you very much for that, Anne. Just for people who are curious, as a bit of context, this survey was actually carried out by a gentleman called Mark Butcher, I believe, who works at a firm called Posetiv.

The actual process of why this was funded was basically by donations from members inside a community who just put some funding in. And there's a couple of other mindy grants that are ongoing now. There's one to create a sustainable AI manifesto, and there's another one which is a playbook for becoming a climate-conscious product manager.

So it's kind of nice to see some of this stuff. I'm looking forward to more things like this being created because you don't need that much money to get some really interesting results and things coming out there into the kind of, I guess, the public discourse. All right, cool. Anne, Asim, are you comfortable with us moving to the next story?

Asim Hussain: Yeah.

Anne Currie: I am.

Chris Adams: Alright, okay, so the next story here is a blog post from Kainos.com. I believe they might be members of the Green Software Foundation, I forget, but this one is basically, the headline is Cost as a Proxy for Carbon, the Inconvenient Truth. And I'll just share a kind of quote from the paragraph, from the piece.

It says, "Many technology related articles and major cloud service providers promote the idea that cost is a proxy for carbon emissions. This suggests that optimizing and reducing your cloud costs can lead to increased sustainability. But is this entirely true? While there is some truth to this statement, it is critical that limitations to this approach are well understood."

So I guess now I should, while I've got access to two experts, I'm going to kind of put it to you two. Anne, when is cost a good proxy for carbon? And when is cost a bad proxy for carbon? Because I've understood that you might have some opinions on this as well.

Anne Currie: I have very strong opinions on this, Chris. I think that at some stages, it's an excellent proxy for carbon. And at some stages, it's gone beyond. It's not really a great proxy anymore. So it depends is the answer. So I'm going to, I'm going to pull in one of our new projects at the Green Software Foundation that I'm the lead on, which is the Green Software Maturity Matrix, which is about the fact that there are kind of, we're all at a different stage.

Most of us are at stage one. We haven't really started down the road of becoming green in our, in our systems. And at that stage, cost is actually a pretty good proxy. If you can halve the number of machines you have, or you can turn off stuff that you're not using, that's a really good way of cutting carbon. But as you get towards the end, you become quite sophisticated and you're doing really clever stuff with tuning and demand shifting and demand shaping. It's not quite such a good, a good measure anymore, but you know, just use your, we all went into tech because it's clever and it's interesting and it's complicated and it's... just use your brain.

Just everything that you save money on is not, is clearly not going to save you carbon and everywhere that saves carbon is not always going to save you money. But as a rule of thumb, if you're turning machines off, that's good.

Chris Adams: Okay. All right. So basically, if you have fewer machines, you have fewer emissions. That's the kind of broad strokes approach that you seem to be out talking about. Now, Asim, I see that you've added a note here that you've seen examples of resizing, reducing emissions, but increasing costs. So maybe you could talk a little bit about that.

And then I'll maybe come in with some takes at my end as well.

Asim Hussain: I've got, yeah, I've got some other hot takes on that as well, actually, but yeah, I have seen, I have not seen many. I have not seen many. So I think I just wanted to point out that, but I don't think that's necessarily, and the absence of information, or what is that statement?

Anne Currie: The absence of information, evidence of absence is not, 

Chris Adams: Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, right? Yeah, yeah.

Asim Hussain: There's a certain absence in our podcast here right now. The, but that effectively, like I have seen some examples of people like when, and where they've tried to do some sort of downsizing and they've happened to have just enough measurement infrastructure in place, which is usually the problem, to actually like determine, Oh, actually, Oh, wow.

That actually increased the cost. Cause you know, sometimes you can right size, but the machine you move to actually costs more and overall just ends on a bit more money, but the actual emissions is less. So it's rare, but I think that's more a statement of we're just not measuring this. But I think more importantly, I think cost has two problems as a proxy for carbon emissions. Number one, and the same, this is the same problem you have with carbon emissions, it's the same issue. A, it's a lagging indicator. Like if you're developing a piece of software, you only know the cost of it after you've rolled it out and you've done it and you've moved on for a month onto the next project, and then somebody goes, "by the way, that's like slightly more expensive than we were expecting."

Like, "Oh, I suppose, but do you want me to stop working on this other project now?" And I'm like, "no, no, no, you carry on that project." It's a lagging indicator. It's like after everything's happened. And I suppose that also means it also has all the other problems that you have with using carbon as a proxy for driving action to reduce carbon emissions, like If you like the, the issue with looking at cost is like someone saying, "well, I'm spending like 3 million on this database and 4 million on this other thing." And you're like, "well, I don't know. I'm, I developed an application. What is my costs?" And so like you have this problem of really it's the problem is more how do you actually get information to the people at the coalface so that they can make decisions to actually reduce the emissions directly? And I think that's the challenge with cost is that you can't, it has all the same problems as carbon in trying to get information to people to actually, so they can know what to do. Because you can tell a department what their cost is, you can tell a department what their carbon is, but can you tell developer X on team Y the impact of a choice they're going to make? Is, I think that's really where we want to get to.

Anne Currie: And I think we're saying exactly the same thing there in a slightly different form. You're saying that it's not a good measure when it comes to tuning what developers do, and I totally agree with that.

I'm saying that generally for where everybody is at the moment, a lot of the good tuning comes at, comes from ops teams rather than development teams. And for ops teams, cost is not so much of a leading indicator. It's actually quite close to what they're doing day to day. So it's a really good metric if your ops team are the one who are doing the tuning to reduce carbon. Not perfect. As you say, it's a terrible, you're better off with performance being a metric if you're doing the development. Yeah.

Asim Hussain: No, you're right. We're talking about different audiences. Yeah. So yeah, to the, to an ops team who are, whose job is to deal with the software after it's deployed, yeah. I suppose it's not a lagging indicator. It is their main indicator.

Anne Currie: But I think that we're in agreement that it's a great proxy for ops teams, but not a great proxy for dev teams.

But it's, but as you say, also, it's not even always a great proxy for ops teams, because often the best thing you can do in terms of operations is to move the whole, your whole shebang to somewhere with a greener grid, but that might well not save you any money.

Asim Hussain: True. 

Chris Adams: Google have some interesting stuff inside this and that. They've got some region pickers which do expose some of this. You can prioritize late cost and carbon. And like, if you cared about carbon, you might move things to Switzerland, for example, compared to running it in, say, other parts of Europe or, say, even America, for example.

So there's stuff like that, that I think you can actually do. But I think when I read through this piece, there was a couple of things that kind of outline on this, like, yes, this can be a bit more complicated, because this kind of assumes, like, if you have this cost as a proxy thing, in many cases, you might have like a commitment to maybe a 50 or an 80 percent discount on your cloud bill, if you've agreed to spend a bunch of cash now.

So now you've got totally different incentives to be doing what you're doing. And like, when we start talking about different instruments that people use to essentially affect the cost of cloud builds, it can be a bit harder to talk about. And there's also this other thing that, let's say you're looking at something like, we don't know which services have particularly high margins versus low margins, which ones lose money versus making money.

Broadly speaking, in 2024, you might assume that for the same amount of work, doing something with, say, a serverless platform like AWS Lambda might be more expensive for the same amount of requests as a dedicated box, for example. So, if you looked at that, that might assume that it's that much more carbon associated.

There's questions there, and like, as Anne mentioned, when you start looking at the edges, you can definitely find all these different edge cases which make it harder to really kind of use. But as a rubric, as a kind of starting point, it may be better than having nothing, basically. And it's not like technology is immune to us looking at easy to measure numbers and assuming that's automatically the truth.

Asim Hussain: Now that is definitely one of the things I would say. I kind of came hot on cost then for a second. But like, what I would say is that in the absence of anything else, which is by large the problem that we have right now, it is one of the best measures that we have. But like, I think we need to move the world forward to better measures eventually. But it is the best that we have right now. If you don't have anything else.

Chris Adams: If we had actual energy 

Asim Hussain: If you had actual, yeah, 

Chris Adams: right? So quickly, it's a commodity.

Anne Currie: It wouldn't. Because even if you've got energy, you know, I would say this, it's still very hard to do a like for like comparison. It's not like performance. Performance is a really good measurement for performance. You know, it's like seconds. How many seconds did it take to do that thing?

I mean, you can put it on different sized machines, different speeds. There are even issues there. But as we all know, you know, sometimes the grid is green and sometimes the grid is not green. So even carbon measurements, you could be running exactly the same thing. Everything can be under your control, but unless you're doing demand shifting and shaping or work shifting and shaping, as now seems to be the more common and correctly, then the name seems to be shifting from demand shifting and shaping to work shifting and shaping, which

is a much better word for it.

Chris Adams: New to me as well, actually. Okay.

Anne Currie: It was, cause I used to complain all the time because

demand is 

Asim Hussain: Did you start changing? Did you start changing the words, Anne? 

Anne Currie: I, it wasn't. I, in the book, it's all demand shifting and shaping. And I do say it's a really terrible description because the demand hasn't changed. As far as we're concerned, the demand comes from users and the users still have demand and we're attempting to meet the demand that they have. We're not intending to shift that. But the name, I think the words demand shifting and demand shaping came from the grid. 

And as far as the grid is concerned, we are the users, not the end users. So what they're talking about is our, as the tech industry, our demand is shifting and shaping, which it is. So there's some confusion about who's the end user in this scenario.

So I have seen some people start to use work shifting and I wish I'd known that they were going to because I've just written a book in which I didn't use those terms.

Chris Adams: Ah, well you heard it here first. Alright, what I'm going to do is I'm going to add a couple of show notes both to basically your book, Anne, and a couple of blog posts. I've written one post recently, a while ago, called Options to make software greener without changing the code and how to remember them, which essentially I'm taking some of the papers I saw at Hot Carbon and trying to translate them into kind of layperson's terms.

So that might be a bit easier, because I think that I agree with you. Demand shaping and demand shifting. These are ideas that have come from the electricity sector that aren't as intuitive to developers, actually. And maybe, I think we've probably got enough there because we've got a few more stories to run through.

Are you comfortable if we move to the next one, folks?

Asim Hussain: I am yeah.

Chris Adams: Okay. All right, so this one is introducing the tech carbon standard. So if you go to www.techcarbonstandard.org, this is a website for, not a standard per se, but a proposed standard from an organization called Scott Logic who are based in the north of England.

This was actually revealed at the state of open conference in February, and the TLDR is the Tech Carbon standard is developed as an approach to classifying an organization as technology estate to enable consistent analysis and benchmarking of its technology carbon footprint. The standard takes inspiration from the globally recognized GHG protocol and its emissions classification in scopes 1, 2, and 3.

And although you can't see this in the audio format, we've shared a link to it. It's basically a diagram, more or less highlighting where you might think emissions take place. Both in the view of the GHG protocol, which is like pretty much the de facto standard for reporting carbon, but also mapped to the kind of bits of software that you might have.

So there's a notion of upstream emissions, where you might be kind of purchasing cloud software, for example, there's operational emissions, which might be talking about you running servers on premise, or something like that. And there's downstream emission, things like end user, and like network transfer, and stuff like that.

So, this is, this is something that is kind of new, and I, I found quite interesting, because Asim, I know that there are very deliberate decisions behind the SCI, the Software Carbon Intensity spec, which has been put forward by the GSF to not try to tack too closely to the, to the GHG protocol.

And it might be worth just to see what you folks think of this, because I think this is quite interesting. And the idea of it being entirely open for other people to use and riff off, I think is quite helpful actually. So maybe I'll hand to, I'll hand to Asim first and then to Anne actually, because Asim has some very, he's got some things he definitely wants to say about scoped emissions. 

Asim Hussain: I'm coming in hot. 

Chris Adams: Yeah.

Asim Hussain: No, I'm not coming in that hot. No, I think it's, I think it's good. I think, look, the GHG protocol was built from the perspective of an, an organization that does manufacturing that, that is what it has been based on. That's why if you're a manufacturing organization, it makes complete sense. Your scope one, your scope two, and your scope one is, I don't know, should we summarize it for people? That the scope one is kind of, if you've got. If you've got an oil drum in the back garden and you're just burning oil. And I don't know many manufacturers that do that, but that would be your scope one emissions. Scope two is the emissions from the electricity that you purchased. And scope three is from all the things that you bought to build the thing, the physical thing that you sell. So it makes a lot of sense from that perspective, but for our world, it's really problematic and especially scope two. Like if you say the word scope two, it's almost meaningless in our world.

Because if you, if I say scope two as a proxy for electricity, well, it's not because if you've got an on premise data center and if you're running your software partly on your own servers and partly on the cloud servers, and you said scope 2, your energy usage, your scope, this is, I can't even explain it, it's so complicated, like your scope 2 is the energy, but only your application can choose, but only on the hardware that you own. The energy that your application uses on the cloud providers falls under Scope 3, Category 11. And so, like, it's really hard to kind of figure out, well, what is the energy? It's like, you have to kind of have this thing. And really, when you say those words, it's so contextual, when you say scope two, it's not what it is to you. It's what it is to the audience that's sitting there and it means different things to different people. So what I do like about this is the attempt that they've got to kind of really look at them and you know, they've got upstream emissions, operational emissions, downstream emissions. When you say operational emissions, it will mean the same thing to everybody you're speaking to, and it's not context specific. So I think it's good from that perspective. It clarifies some of the stuff. So I think there's some good stuff here. I do. Yeah. I think it's some good thinking. I think my advice is to get into detail, when you click on servers and storage, the only description is the energy consumed by on premise servers and data centers. And I suppose we all know there's a lot of, there's a lot of meat behind that one that you've got to, you've got to flesh out. But yeah, I think my rant on scopes is over. So I'll pass it on to other people.

Chris Adams: Thank you for sharing that particular point of view, Asim. Anne, I suspect you might have something to share as well here. So yeah, what did you think when you saw this?

Anne Currie: Well, I always think all work in this area is great. All discussion we're doing around this is great. Fantastically great. But I always think about taking it back to my Maturity Matrix projects on the GSF Maturity Matrix project. You need to do different things at different times. So this information is useful to you in different things at different times of your journey.

So for most of us at the moment, we're not doing anything at all. Just, you know, you really don't need that much data. You know, your scope one, scope two, scope three are not immediately critical to most people who just need to turn off the machines they're not using anymore, right. Do a bit of right sizing.

Have a think about what they're up to. Start to think about, are they in green regions? What are the future? What platforms are they choosing? Are they likely to be aligned with the green future? To start with, where most of us are at the moment, you don't need a great deal of data to really make a huge difference.

So it's absolutely fantastic that they're doing this work. And that we're doing this work. Everybody's doing this work. We don't want to lose sight of the fact that for almost everybody at the moment, we don't even need data. We just need to start to, to use best operational practices.

Chris Adams: All right, so you don't need, you don't need to wait until you have data. You're, or don't, sorry, don't need to have all the data, is what you're saying, because I don't think you're saying you don't need to have data to work on this. It's more like you're not, okay, all right, I think I know more or less where you're going with this.

Okay, one thing that I'll share with this that I thought was quite interesting was, this is the first time I've seen someone really outline scope one, actually, like burning fuel for generators and things like that, because this can add up, and there's also steps that you can take to basically, reduce the environmental impact of running generators themselves, actually.

So, you know how most of this stuff runs on diesel, basically, right? So, diesel is what you'll be burning in a data center, most of the time, if you're not running on electricity. And, this will be tested quite a few times a year, for example. There's a thing called, I think, Hydrogen Treated... oh God, what is it again?

There's a specific treatment for diesel, which basically is a way to remove all the kind of bits of dead, long dead animals and plants from it, which essentially make it less harmful for people nearby to be breathing it. And that can actually come from biological sources like, or biogenic, as in things which are non-fossil, for example, there are non fossil sources of HVO diesel that you can have, which is one way that you can reduce some of the footprints on this. And although it's only a few hours in a given year, maybe 100 hours in the 9 000 hours that you do have, that's very dirty stuff and it has a very kind of localized impact on people.

So it's kind of nice to actually see that called out for the first time. So I found this quite helpful and it was when I first came across it and I'm glad to see it open for a bit of work on. Alright, shall we move to the next story, or Asim, you've got something you want to share? 

Asim Hussain: Just a hot take.

Isn't it funny that like these buildings, which contain some of the most advanced technology that human beings have ever created in the history of our existence, maybe, that are completely chock full, that are huge, just in case they go down, we burn dead animals to, to power them.

Like we, if, if we can do that with the technology inside the buildings, we can do something with the technology that powers them.

Chris Adams: I think, okay, alright, inspiring. 

Asim Hussain: heard any of that. I don't 

Chris Adams: we've got one more story, and then we'll wrap up a bit. So, we're going to link to the IEA's recent report. So the IEA is the International Energy Agency, and they made some headlines earlier on this year with their link to the electricity report.

Basically, they talk about what's happening over the next 10 years with electricity. And one of the headlines was they were saying that electricity consumption from data centers in terms of like AI and the cryptocurrency sector could double by 2026. So I'll just use the quote that I pulled from it, which was "electricity consumption from data centers, artificial intelligence, and the cryptocurrency sector could double by 2026.

Data centers are significant drivers of growth in electricity demand in many regions. After globally consuming an estimated 460 terawatt hours, in 2022, datacenters total electricity consumption could reach more than a thousand terawatt hours in 2026." So that's a doubling in essentially, what, two years?

This is particularly interesting because this is way higher than their previous figures that they used to have which were around 200. So Something's changed with these numbers for them to be that much higher. And I figured I'd open the floor to either of you about this because this has got a lot of pushback from the data center industry.

But there's also people who work in the energy sector saying maybe there's something to it. So Asim, maybe I'll ask you what's your view on this one?

Asim Hussain: Well $7 trillion worth of chips cost a lot of energy to power. So, you know, like I think AI is a lot bigger than we think. And I'm not saying that in a way that is in any way negative. I think it's just, we have to accept this is the future that we're living in. This is the current present that we're living in. I strongly suspect that some of these numbers are taking that into account. The growth in AI has been significant. We all know on this call that the previous dirty secret of data centers where most of those servers were idle. In a future of AI, those chips are not going to be idle. They're going to be running at a hundred percent.

So like, I think we've spoken on this call previously about, you know, various previous reports that talked about, you know, given the current trajectory by 2040, the tech sector will be like 14 percent of global emissions. I wonder if anybody's doing any analysis to revisit, well, now, given what we now know about the complete, AI will take over everything. It is taking over everything right now. How does that look now? Where will we be in 2040 with the current growth in AI? Will tech be half of all emissions? And will we just be sitting there, you know, being carried around by robots and being fed by little tubes like that robot show? But I think, I strongly suspect that they factor that in. And, and I wonder if it's an underestimate.

Chris Adams: Okay. All right. So that's what you got from executive director of the GSF, but that's not his official opinion. Yeah, yeah. Anne, what about you? Where are you on this one here?

Anne Currie: Well, I think Asim's right that, and those numbers are probably right, that AI is eating the world, and it's incredibly requiring of energy, but I'm also going to come back to something that Asim and I have both said previously, all three of us have all said previously, which is "Does it matter?" Because AI is a really good example of a workload that works well with the fact that some places are much, have much more potential to generate green power than others. It's a latency insensitive workload that could be running in Greenland, not that Greenland has a massive data center industry at the moment, but it could do. It could be running further away. But, but also I think it feeds into something that I was reading that almost comes full circle with the discussion we were having earlier about data centers and how they're used and whether or not they're used well.

I mean, the ideal at the moment is we'd start building data centers as places where there was water for cooling and green energy for powering the data centers. And then you have to worry about the embodied carbon, but you don't have to worry about the, you know, if AI uses huge quantities of energy, but it's all green, then it doesn't matter.

And it's not, and that energy isn't necessarily being used for other things because nobody wants it to heat their home in wherever it is, the middle of nowhere, where we've put our data centers. But we need to have a think about data centers more generally. Something that comes up quite a lot is water use in data centers.

So at the moment we can't necessarily put data centers that could run on solar in places where it could run on solar because there's a lack of water, but there was an interesting, I read a very interesting article about that and I shall, I'll send you the link to that about PUE driving companies to overwhelmingly cool data centers with water, because that doesn't count against the PUE score. But in fact, if you're in a place where there's tons and tons of electricity, green electricity, you could be cooling your data centers by using aircon and that would be not a hit on, on water, but it would make your score, your incredibly important PUE score,

because we're focused entirely on a metric, which is not a great metric, is forcing up water use. So, yeah, it takes us full back to the full circle of metrics are useful, but do not overly lean on them, or it can be worse than if you had never had them to start with.

Chris Adams: Okay. All right. Thank you for that, Anne. This actually makes me think of a recent interview between Jigar Shah, who is the head of the US loan program office, and David Roberts, who runs the podcast Volts. It's a really, really interesting one. It's particularly talking about nuclear in the specific, but I'm going to share a link to it in the show notes because it gives, it basically has the person who's the head of the loan program office saying "we have data centers speaking to us. They're expecting this kind of load. And the figures there are extremely high." And they're actually not that far away from the numbers I see here, which was surprising for me. Because the IEA, A had much lower figures before. But there's also another document that we can link to, which has numbers which might not be exactly the same as these figures here, basically.

We'll add a few more, because this discussion about how much power is actually being consumed and how much is going to this is very much a relevant one, especially when you think about, okay, if we've got this much energy, are we going to use it to meet demands of AI or are we going to use it to decarbonize the rest of the world?

Because there is a finite amount of green energy that you can actually deploy in a given amount of time and space. And this is something that we tend not to talk about right now. And maybe this is something that we need to touch on a little bit later. And this might be a nice segue to the next story, which we'll just kind of wrap up with.

One of our last ones. This is a piece of datacenter research from the European Commission, basically. Actually, we mentioned a gentleman called George Kamiya. George Kamiya was leading this research with another gentleman called Paulo Bertoldi. This is essentially energy consumption in data centers and broadband comms networks in the EU.

And the thing that's interesting here is this is country by country information for both data centers and for networks. And it's worth a read if you want to have some numbers to talk about this. And there's a really interesting chart that we'll also add to the show notes. Anne, I'll hand over to you first because you have some things you want to share about this and then Asim, I'll hand over to you if that's okay.

Anne Currie: It's a really fascinating report with a lot of interesting data in it that we haven't seen previously. So I thought that the main takeaway from the report for me was that generally speaking, most countries in the world, that the percentage of energy use by data centers and by telecoms is fairly consistent.

It's kind of like data centers are around one and a half, two percent of electricity use within the country. The only time where that really isn't true is in places where there are lots of data. They are the data center for the world. There are a dis disproportionate number of data centers in that country like Ireland, for example, Denmark, the Netherlands, and it, it'll be interesting to see whether or not those are the places where all the data centers are in future, because I would like to see the data centers in places where there is an awful lot of green Power that is not used, Chris, as you were just saying, in any particular location, you don't want all the green power being sucked up by AI, you want it to go into other things as well, but in places where we could build data centers and there isn't a great deal of other use for the green power, and it isn't competing on a local grid, I hate the whole thing of use your data center heat to heat municipal pools, because that's immediately saying your data center is somewhere where it is competing with folk, with people, for their energy requirements. Data centers should be in the middle of nowhere, which is terrible for people who work in data centers, so I'm sorry. But, that's what the robots should be doing, running data centers.

Chris Adams: Okay. All right. Asim, I'll hand over to you before we wrap up and then come to the last story. Go for it, mate. 

Asim Hussain: Well, I don't, as we were speaking, I just realized that I, what, why? What is it about? I know, I've known for a long time that Ireland has, I've known this statistic for a long time, but I don't know why. What is it about Ireland? Is it a tax haven type? 

Anne Currie: It's a tax dodge, I think. 

Chris Adams: So you're talking about context. So for context, you cannot see the chart, but we're looking at a chart with country by country figures, which shows the energy used in terawatt hours by data centers, the energy used by the telecom sector, and then the share of national energy use. And for most countries, it's between 3 and 5 percent or maybe 1. 5 percent and 4 percent in most cases, except in Ireland where it's hovering around 19 percent or 20%. So you got close to 20 percent of all the power used in Ireland to run data centers, which are predominantly a set of hyperscale data centers. And if you read through the report, you'll see that figure was around 10 percent in 2019.

So in the last few years, you've seen a doubling in usage here. And the other kind of outliers you might compare to are Denmark, which is around 5 percent of total energy usage and the Netherlands, which is a little bit over 5%, but in particular it is very exceptional in that it's multiples larger than everyone else right now.

That's from what we can see so far, one of the largest sources of Load Growth inside the sector, inside there. And there's also, what we'll do is share a link to a actual consultation from the CIO, the Irish Grid Operators, where there's some really eye opening responses from both academics and from data center operators, basically saying "we should be doing this, and we shouldn't be doing this," and some of the charts are pretty eye opening. Yeah, that's, you're right, as Anne mentioned, Anne, you spoke about was Ireland has been considered one of the places with very low tax, and as a result, large corporates love it, basically.

Asim Hussain: Is that what it is? If it's a low tax? I mean, cause then. The solution is to reduce the tax in areas where it has greener energy or something like that? I think there's 

Chris Adams: Do you think that's the case? 

Asim Hussain: Well I don't know and if it is, I mean we have to look at this whole situation

Chris Adams: They're just the prescription of reducing tax in the one place that has very, very low tax compared to maybe increasing the tax there so that you have a bunch of companies that need to choose based on carbon. I think that there's different prescriptions you might use to solve this particular problem if you see that as one of the problems that we have here.

Asim Hussain: Well no, I think it's just acknowledging the fact that if that's the situation and it was being driven by a low tax. You're right, maybe tax is the solution if tax is the problem.

Chris Adams: If you look at Luxembourg, Luxembourg is the other place with extremely high percentage of data center usage, which is actively courting data centers, which doesn't have particularly clean energy. And that's also one of the high ones. And it's also known for not being the place with the highest tax in the world.

So there's this idea that essentially low tax increases the amount of data centers you're going to have in a particular place, especially if they're large hyperscalers. But that's not necessarily means that you're going to have green energy there all the time. All right, Anne, over to you.

Anne Currie: I was just going to say, in the long run, hopefully, the solution to high prices is high prices. The solution will be that green is much cheaper. So, hopefully, the actual cost of electricity going down will overtake the tax breaks and things that are currently distorting the market. We really want data centers to be in places where the electricity is cheap. That is the, green will be cheap. So...

Chris Adams: Okay, thanks, Anne. All right, then. Okay, last story, because we're just running a little bit over on time. The last thing we're going to link to was actually this carbon hack thing. Asim, given this is like taking over your life, I figured it might make sense to give a bit of space for you to talk about what on earth you're doing and why people might go to it.

So, why do people care about carbon hack and why are you working on this thing? Because that might, yeah, justify your existence, Asim. That's maybe the way to think about it.

Asim Hussain: Just to save me. So this year we're running CarbonHack. It's running in about three weeks actually now. And the thing that I'm really excited about it is that the main topic of running is a framework that we've been building here called Impact Framework. Which is many things, but it's a tool to help you measure and really be very transparent regarding your software emissions.

A lot of the stuff we've spoken about today is this question of, is something a good proxy, is it a good measure? What is it? Oh, and what impact framework is, it allows you to, through a set of plugins, build a bespoke calculator, which can take observations that you can make about your software system and turn them into impacts like water, energy, carbon, things like that. But the most important thing about it, and it's something I don't really talk about enough, but it is that everything is stored in this thing called a manifest file. Everything. So the future I want to see is a future where somebody's not telling me what the carbon emissions are, because what is carbon? It's somebody giving me their manifest file, and it has all the coefficients, all the models, all the inputs, every assumption they've made in that calculation is that manifest file. And if I don't like it I'll change it. I'll adjust it. I don't like your model? I'll change your model. I don't like your coefficient?

I'll change your coefficient. And I can rerun it and I can judge what your emissions are. That's the real power of it and that's what we're doing with CarbonHack. We've got a bunch of prizes. One of the things we really need for Impact Framework to grow is a lot of plugins. Everything I just described is aspirational.

We need plugins to help compute web, to compute AI, to compute all these other, all these other things, to compute water. And that's a large part of the hackathon this year, is to encourage people to build plugins for Impact Framework. So I encourage you to go to hack.greensoftware.foundation and you can find out more information on it.

And I'm also giving, if you go to that website shortly, I'm also giving a lot of training and workshops on Impact Framework over the next couple of weeks. So if you want to learn more about it, just learn how it works, there will be lots of training sessions coming your way shortly.

Chris Adams: Okay. All right. Thanks for that. So, hack.greensoftware.Foundation is what people look at if they want to take part of this distributed, online, weeks long hackathon that doesn't involve you having to be awake for three weeks. You can do it in your own time, right?

Asim Hussain: Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Adams: Okay, cool. Alright then. I think that'll take us up to the end that we have, actually.

So, Asim, Anne, it's been lovely chatting to you again. I missed you, actually, so thank you for coming on for this. Like I mentioned before, all the show notes and all the links will be on software.greensoftware.Foundation. So if you go there, that's what you can find. And there'll also be a link to the transcript of this podcast, plus the links in markdown format.

So if there's a thing you see that's incorrect, or if there's a thing that you think we missed out, we do accept pull requests and you'd be contributing to the greater knowledge or the greater good for people to explore green software themselves. Thanks again, and yeah, let's do this again sometime soon.

Asim Hussain: Yeah. Thanks, Chris. Great to see you again, Anne.

Chris Adams: 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.

Chris Adams is joined by special guest Kate Goldenring, Senior Software Engineer at Fermyon. Together, they ask the real questions “is serverless computing the greener choice?” and “if so, under what circumstances is this true?” Tune in for an illuminating conversation on the current state, news, and future of green computing, digging into the topics of cloud computing,  soft allocation, WebAssembly, and more.

Learn more about our people:

• Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | Website
• Kate Goldenring: LinkedIn | X

Find out more about the GSF:

• The Green Software Foundation Website 
• Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter

News:

• https://github.com/Green-Software-Foundation/podcast-transcripts/pull/1 [09:00]
• PLATYPUS [09:30]
• Sysdig 2023 Cloud-Native Security and Usage Report [13:40]
• XFaaS: Hyperscale and Low Cost Serverless Functions at Meta | Proceedings of the 29th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles [14:03]

Events:

• Carbon Hack 24: Where measurement meets innovation, and impact knows no bounds 

Resources:

• tag-runtime/wg/iot-edge.md at main [04:24]
• Bytecode Alliance [05:47]
• Basic Alpine Climbing Course - Seattle - 2024 — The Mountaineers [08:09]
• A greener, cost effective cloud with serverless WebAssembly [13:00]
• Surprising Scalability of Multitenancy - Marc's Blog [22:34]
• Introducing Spin | Fermyon [31:01]
• Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) Specification Project | GSF [39:17]
• Take it to the limit: peak prediction-driven resource overcommitment in datacenters [41:06]
• GitHub - fermyon/spin: Spin is the open source developer tool for building and running serverless applications powered by WebAssembly. [42:36]
• Fermyon Discord server [43:09] 
• https://hotcarbon.org/assets/2022/pdf/hotcarbon22-sharma.pdf [43:30]
• Fermyon Technologies [45:56]

If you enjoyed this episode then please either:

• Follow, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts
• Follow and rate on Spotify
• Watch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!

Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!

TRANSCRIPT BELOW:

Kate Goldenring: It is very clear that you reduce operational emissions by not running your application when you're not using it, so by leaving the gym. But actually, by oversubscribing, we're also reducing embodied emissions by having higher density and not needing as many servers. And so, I think this whole concept can help us decrease our software carbon intensity.

Chris Adams: 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, Chris Adams.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Environment Variables, where we bring you the latest news, And updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams. When we talk about reducing the environmental footprint of software, it's common to talk about making an application more efficient by using better algorithms or relying on languages that make more efficient use of resources than others.

However, the fact remains. That for most software in the world, most of the energy use comes from having millions of computers waiting for something to happen, rather than actively doing work themselves. So if you have software designed to let someone book a ticket, or buy a book, any time of day the transaction might only take a few minutes to complete, but the software still needs to be running 24/7 in a powered up state, constantly consuming resources to make that possible.

Now, common wisdom was that you need to design for peak amount of traffic you'd ever expect to see, and then just accept that paying to run all those servers all the time, waiting for something to respond was just the way it had to work. Serverless computing broke this assumption. Instead of paying per hour to have your software constantly running and available, waiting for responses, you'd design your software a specific way and pay to use it on a per request basis instead. When your software wasn't actively serving requests, it would scale all the way down to zero and you wouldn't be billed for these dormant periods. If an incoming request did come in, your software would wake up, serve them again, before going back to sleep.

And in aggregate, this would result in fewer machines needing to be run. Because computing resources were being allocated in a more efficiently across a large number of programs, running them only when they needed to do work. So that was the idea, at least. While we touch on the details later in this episode, there are definitely trade offs you need to accept when designing serverless programs.

And while the term serverless implies a lack of servers, there are still racks of kit required to run this infrastructure. So, is serverless computing the greener choice? If so, under what circumstances this is true, and what's the difference between a virtual machine, container, or even a WebAssembly runtime?

Joining me today is Kate Goldenring, whose work I came across when she answered a really specific, really detailed question I'd asked about serverless computing. In the Green Software Foundation discussion forums, when I was trying to make sense of it all, she responded with a really helpful answer, citing a number of peer reviewed papers, as well as linking to a really informative talk that she delivered at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation Sustainability Week a few days earlier.

So when I asked her if she'd be up for coming on the show to talk about some of the details of serverless computing, she agreed and I'm really happy to welcome her on to Environment Variables. Kate, welcome.

Kate Goldenring: Hi Chris, thank you for having me. So I am very happy that that forum existed and brought us together. I am a senior software engineer at Fermyon, and we're very excited about serverless WebAssembly. And so that's something that we'll be talking about throughout this and in general, to touch on my career, I started at Microsoft, where I was actually focused on edge computing solutions.

And I developed a project called Akri, which is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation, CNCF, sandbox project for managing IoT devices around Kubernetes clusters. So from the start, I was very into open source software and got to really kick off my career there, which I'm very grateful for. And I'm still in the IoT edge space.

I serve as co chair of the CNCF iOT edge working group and have authored a couple of white papers on edge computing best practices within that working group.

Chris Adams: Oh, Kate, can I just stop you just for one second? Did you say, so you were with Microsoft back then and you mentioned Akri. Now I think that was like a few years back. Was there a project called Deus that was floating around in Microsoft land there? Like they want a little bit like say, wow, that takes us 10, back 10 years or so actually.

Okay. So Deus was one of these platform as a service things, a bit like Cloud Foundry and stuff like that. Right?

Kate Goldenring: Yeah, and Deus was acquired by Microsoft and Deus Labs was how it was renamed. And it became this hub within Microsoft for its open source cloud native projects. And so Akri became a project under Deus, and then it was donated to the CNCF after that.

Chris Adams: Okay, gotcha. Thanks.

Kate Goldenring: Yeah, so a bit of an evolution in how open source worked within Microsoft as well, and I actually, while working on Akri and in that open source world within Deus, I learned about WebAssembly, and I got very excited, in part because I saw the potential of it for green computing and reducing the carbon intensity of software, and so I actually decided to leave Microsoft to join Fermyon, which is a startup in the WebAssembly space.

And I'm still in the open source world contributing to our open source tooling there. And we actually work with the Bytecode Alliance, which is an alliance, as it sounds, of companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, Adobe, Fermyon were involved. And it's all about building out WebAssembly specifications so it can do more in more places.

So that's kind of also where I am now within the weeds of the WebAssembly world.

Chris Adams: Okay, cool. All right. I'm, I'm glad you mentioned WebAssembly because we'll touch on that a little bit later about what it actually is and why some of that is relevant, but I should probably introduce myself too, for people who are new to this podcast. So my name is Chris Adams. I am the executive director of the Green Web Foundation, which is a Dutch nonprofit focused on reaching a fossil-free internet by 2030.

I'm also one of the policy chairs of the Green Software Foundation policy working groups. And I'm also one of the maintainers of a library called co2.js, which as you imagine is a library to help you work out the carbon footprint of various digital services. Alright. So, Kate, you're sitting comfortably, right?

Kate Goldenring: Of course.

Chris Adams: Okay, cool.

Before we dive into the finer points of serverless computing, I understand it's quite early. It's earlier for you than it is for me. So it's about 4 p. m. in Berlin, 7 a. m. or 8, 7 a. m. for you, right? In Seattle, yeah?

Okay. And as I understand it, when you're not in front of a computer, there are some upsides to living in Seattle.

So maybe you could tell me a little bit about that before we dive into the nerdery, because when you shared some stories here, it pleased me actually, and I quite enjoyed some of the kind of names of some of the groups you're, you're part of.

Okay, 

Kate Goldenring: Yeah, I'm happy to be running advertisement for the city of Seattle. I absolutely love it out here. I am an outdoor enthusiast, and I was even before I moved here. But moving here kind of took that to new heights, if we're going to be a little bit punny about it. But when I, right, soon after moving here, I actually learned that I had some.

Some history with one of the mountains here, Tahoma is also known as Rainier. And I found out that my mom actually attempted to summit it when she was pregnant with me. And we did not make it to the top. I think you could probably blame me for that. But after hearing that, I was curious. And so I tried as well with a guided group and also did not make it to the top, but got to weirdly the same spot, which kind of continues this weird chain of events. But what did happen was that I really fell in love with the sport. And so I joined my local climbing club, which is called the Mountaineers. And now a few years later, I spend a fair bit of my week, three to six hours, probably helping instruct that course that I kind of kicked off this love with and teaching a cohort of students, leading trips and climbs.

So I definitely, when I'm not in front of my computer, am thinking about planning trips, going on trips, and definitely grateful to be in Seattle.

Chris Adams: Okay, cool. Thank you for that, Kate. All right. It seems we're going to continue this run of peak related puns with the next section as well, actually. So before we dive into this show and some of the things we'll be talking about, here's a reminder that everything we talk about, every project that we speak about will link in our show notes.

And the show notes are also published in markdown form on a GitHub repo now. And this is my point to thank one of the, one of the people from who actually submitted a pull request to our last set of show notes, Ross Fairbanks of FlatPeak. He made the first PR to the transcript where he helped us name, basically last week, we were talking about some of the specifics about,

how do I say, about a certain kind of attack, security attack that is actually named after an animal. We couldn't remember it, but it's, you need to know about this if you're going to do decent energy and carbon reporting. So we were asking, "can someone please name this?" And Ross was dutifully the person to come in and name, "yes, this is called the platypus attack," and not just that, it's one of these cool IT security vulnerabilities with a really, really nice looking website.

So we've now updated that. I will link to both the PR and this attack. So you now know when someone is telling you why they can't share information, you can say, "well, no, yes, we've heard of the Platypus attack and this is the mitigation for it." So yeah, that's like the depths of our nerdery that we go into.

All right then. So we've covered that. And if there are any typos or things that we mentioned that you don't see linked, you will be able to make a pull request and we will basically thank you in just the same way we thanked Ross. So you can get your 35 seconds of fame as well as you do this. Okay. And hopefully that should be a good incentive for listeners to basically help create a useful artifact for other people moving forward.

All right then. Okay. Kate, I tried to give a good intro into serverless computing. And when I saw the talk that you presented, you had a really interesting framing that I hadn't come across where you spoke about the value of a service versus the costs of making it available to people. And I figured this might be a nice way to kind of open up, because this is actually, I find it really, really enabling for me to think about kind of having websites available and how you even do that, or even why you might even have a website running in the first place. So maybe if I just like gave you the floor, it would help us set things up for some of the later conversation, actually.

Kate Goldenring: Sure. And I want to call out that I similarly had an epiphany when I discovered this concept and I actually found it within Mark Brooker's blog. He's a distinguished engineer at AWS and one of the original authors of AWS Lambda. And in this blog, he talks about how the cost of a system does not always equal the value you get out of the system. And in a cloud context, the cost of running an application on a piece of hardware is the amount of compute resources you need available for it. And so as you mentioned at the start, oftentimes we provision for the peak. So the traffic to an application is rarely constant. And when you're choosing how many resources to provision, you have to make sure there's enough of those resources of CPU and memory to handle a burst of requests. And so this means that we pay for the short term peak traffic that an application may get. However, when we think about the value we get out of a system, that's the long term average traffic. And you can think about this and even see this in payment models for serverless platforms, where you may be paying for average requests per month. And so the problem with this, when you're paying for the peak but you're receiving the average is that we have this gap and that can cause low resource utilization. And so we ideally want to close this gap and a way to do that is with multitenancy. And so multitenancy is running multiple independent applications in a shared environment. And if you increase the multitenancy of a system, so you throw a bunch of uncorrelated applications on the same hardware, where each has its own traffic ebbs and flows, the idea is that their peaks balance each other and traffic flattens. And this line gets as close to average traffic as possible. And so now we've had our costs equal our value and it's, we're all happy. But this is in some ways very idealistic. We're assuming applications are uncorrelated. We're also assuming that you have some underlying technology wherein when you aren't running your application, it is scaled absolutely to zero. It's using no resources. So this is where I get a little excited. Cause I do think we are coming upon a world where that can happen. And that is with WebAssembly, which can have these sub millisecond cold starts. And the whole goal of all of this from the context of green software is that we want higher hardware utilization, as you mentioned earlier.

Chris Adams: Okay. So what it sounds like you're saying is that this, like this idea of like multitenancy or maybe a little bit like a gym, multiple people using the same thing. This is actually a kind of a common theme. And this basically increases the average amount of use of the kit. So it's not sitting there just waiting to do stuff, essentially.

Right? 

All 

Kate Goldenring: Yeah. And just to point out a stat to kind of nail that home. Sysdig did a report in 2023, the Cloud Native Security and Container Usage Report, and found that 69 percent of CPU is unused in containerized cloud deployments. So we're really only using 30 percent of the resources there. And ideally we would flip that number and we would be constantly using 70 percent of the resources. And one of the ways to do this is with higher multitenancy and different technologies, and there's a really interesting paper from Meta about XFaaS, which is a serverless solution they now have created for private clouds that came out in 2023, and they found this phenomena that we talked about, the peak to average, and they describe it as the peak to trough, so not the average, but the lowest amount of requests at any given point, and found that it can be 4.3 times. So these peaks are quite high is the point of that. And the way they respond to it is by determining which workloads are delay tolerant. And so then they'll move the delay tolerant workloads to execute as a different time. And time shifting is a common thing and common recommended practice in green software.

So I also want to mention that this isn't always the way we expect it to be. Not, you can't perfectly fill a piece of hardware with uncorrelated applications and you might have to find some other techniques to balance out your request frequency.

Chris Adams: Okay. There's a couple of things that you mentioned that I just want to drill down on first of all. So you first mentioned this idea that most of the time, most computers are doing nothing, right, or they're waiting, like even with something like containers, which are considered a relatively efficient way to have lots and lots of programs running, more than two thirds of the time, they're just like not actually in use.

And this is at the kind of higher levels, like say when we talk about, say hyperscale providers, you might see people talking about, "Oh, we're really good. We've achieved say 30 percent level of utilization. And that's like 10 times higher than what you might have when you're using like a series of virtual machines or even like physical machines."

So there's a, basically a bunch of waste that this is designed to kind of get rid of, and I think the paper you referred to with XFaaS, they were, they basically said, "well, yeah, 30 is good, but we can go higher than that. If by, by doing some of these tricks, we've hit like 50 or 60%, which again means that many fewer bits of hardware to run this." 

Okay. But you also touched on something there. You said that this was a private cloud, so there's certain assumptions. What about, about the softwares? Because it's the same company, they can trust each other's workloads and they don't need to keep these things as safe from each other as they, as other ones might, or there might not be the same, there might be the same priority compared to like, say, if you're running a cloud provider with lots and lots of different customers who don't necessarily want to share each other's stuff.

Maybe you could talk a little bit about this idea of virtualization and actually serverless and this idea of like isolation and why it's important. Because I think for a lot of people, they don't really, this is not something that you need to think too much about as a customer so much. You just need to know it's there, but when you're designing a system, there's actually quite a few things that you need to take into account for this.

And there's been different approaches that have been developing over the last, say, 10 to 15 years, for example.

Kate Goldenring: Yeah, I think we talked about how great it is to throw a bunch of different people's applications all together on the same piece of hardware. But that is a very scary statement to a lot of people to have their application running next to someone else's application. So there's this concept of isolation.

The idea that I will be okay with you running my application next to someone else's in a public cloud so long as these criteria are met. And isolation really just means that you know that your application won't be prevented from using resources because you have an application that's hogging them. And you also know that there's not another application that's going to access your application's data.

And we can actually look at the cloud as having gone through waves of this concept of isolation and keeping things separate from each other. And with each wave being motivated by a more finite mechanism of isolation, and also leading to a new type of cloud application that's come out of that wave and you hinted that kind of the start, which is virtual machines and that the advent of virtual machines, the ability to virtualize hardware with hypervisor technology has made it so that we can have multiple independent applications running on the same piece of hardware. And it didn't change the way people necessarily built their applications. It was still monolithic applications, but we could do more with the same amount of hardware now, and for context of time to start up and scale up, virtual machines take a few minutes to start.

So, if you wanted to scale up the number of virtual machines, it was a slower process. Next wave, you can think of as the wave of containers, and with containers, now we're virtualizing a smaller set of technology. We're virtualizing the operating system, and now we can run dozens of tenants on the same physical hardware. And this has brought about the advent of microservices, so I can scale up individual parts of my application instead of just scaling up the whole entire application.

Chris Adams: So could I just check, so you, so we spoke about VMs, virtual machines, so it might take a few minutes to spin up and down and then containers will be a little bit faster. Maybe Sub second or around a second. And both of these, like, these are, these are still an improvement on a physical machine, which can be weeks to get a new box set up, for example.

But the advantage of a physical machine is like you have like literal physical isolation, it's totally separate from computing. So that's the idea. And there are very different approaches you can have to separate this out. And you were talking about containers and VMs, and I understand there's a few other, there's a few other steps on this kind of continuum from a total separate machine to your share of a physical machine inside it in a VM or a container or something like that. Right?

Kate Goldenring: Exactly. And so we've gotten smaller. And then you can think of as the next wave being one of serverless. So being able to have even more applications on the same physical hardware. And this was really pioneered by the advent of the micro VM. And if you're familiar with AWS Lambda, the underlying technology for that is the micro VM, and with micro VMs now we, it only takes 125 milliseconds to start up a micro VM, and so it creates this opportunity to be able to run something only when you need it, which is a great, great future to realize.

The only issue with that number is that we, we know that a hundred millisecond is kind of the boundary of where you start to notice latency, and when you add execution time and network on top of this, this 125 milliseconds becomes a bit larger. And so the result was they had to pre warm these instances, so they had to get them running before you even needed them, so they have to use resources, even when they're not being used.

And that, that eats into our cost and value equation we had earlier. And so Serverless has these great opportunities, but hadn't been realized quite yet. And so the next way that I'm particularly excited about is powering and realizing serverless with WebAssembly, and achieving even higher density, and having those instant cold starts, and we're still isolated, just like a micro VM.

But instead we use a WebAssembly runtime to isolate your application using linear memory and WebAssembly also has a capability-based security model so that you only have access to resources you've been explicitly granted access to in the runtime. And so you still, through all these waves can have varying, but pretty solid levels of confidence that your workload is isolated, but we're getting into different levels and ways of computing and building our applications

Chris Adams: Uh, Ah, okay, thanks. Alright, so you spoke about this, this thing called micro VMs, which I understand was it, it sounds like basically an virtual machine, but smaller. And as I understood that, that might be, it's smaller because rather than trying to create totally virtual machine where you have all the kind of things that a regular virtual machine might have.

Like you can plug a printer in or plug stuff like that. It's just a much, much smaller service area. And as I understand it, there's a service called fly. io. They use Firecracker as one of their main options. Okay. I think I understand where you're going with that. And that, so that's an improvement on VMs and possibly has offered some of the kind of isolation benefits that some people have basically criticized containers for not having.

But then with like WebAssembly, this smaller thing, there's a, there are basically different approaches taken to make sure that other people's code isn't going to touch your code and vice versa. That's what you're talking about with things like linear memory and this capabilities based thing where you almost, you have to grant access to something first, right?

Kate Goldenring: Exactly. There's different methods to achieving isolation. And I also want to point out that we've been talking about one type of isolation, which is per-tenant isolation. So the idea that one tenant is isolated from the other, but there's also an even finer grained type of isolation that we can get in this latest wave of cloud computing.

And that is per-request isolation. So the idea is that my one request to my application should be isolated from the other. And in an ideal serverless world, you'd be able to guarantee statelessness across requests so that if my first request triggered a bug, It should at most affect that request. And the way you do that is by creating a new instance or a new isolation for each request.

And that's been really hard to do in the past when it takes 125 milliseconds to start up your virtual environment. But with WebAssembly, because it can start in a millisecond, you can actually create a new instance of your application for every single request on request. So you have an even finer interpretation of this isolation world.

Chris Adams: Ah, okay. All right. That helps me. Okay. So you've gone from like 125 to one, which is much, much, much faster. So that's the general idea that you have there. And I should probably ask. When you're doing something like this, I, I kind of understand the idea that if you are able to ramp up and down really, really, really fast, then you you can probably fit more peaks inside it because someone else's peak will end, will end faster than making space for someone else's peak to come in, basically.

So that's the general idea. I'm not that familiar with WebAssembly myself, and maybe it might be worth just talking about what that part actually is, because I'm a developer. I might code in Python or possibly JavaScript sometimes. Do I need to learn something new? Maybe you could just touch on some of that before, and then we could see how some of that fits in, because this sounds cool and something starting up 125 times faster also sounds good, as well as being much, much more efficient. But I quite like coding in Python and I'm getting a bit old, so I'm not sure if I want to dive into learning yet another language, if I can help it, basically.

Kate Goldenring: I definitely don't want to take Python from you. So WebAssembly, as its name suggests, was actually made for the browser. So the browser, most applications were built in JavaScript, and people were tied to their language of choice, say Python. And so WebAssembly was created so that you can build web applications in languages other than JavaScript.

It is just a target for a language runtime and a universal bytecode. And so you can write your application in Python and compile it to WebAssembly, and then you could run it in the browser. That was the whole idea. And because it was run in the browser, it got all these different characteristics, such as being isolated because the browser has a bunch of. public code running next to each other. And so you need to isolate it. And that's also why it's fast. But the result is that we have this portable bytecode that can be compiled to from a lot of different languages. And if you're curious which languages can compile to WebAssembly, there are different categories of the level of support a language can have for WebAssembly.

It can compile to Wasm. And also just to clarify, I've been using this word Wasm. Maybe as well, Wasm is an acronym, so a shortening of WebAssembly. So I might

Chris Adams: Ah, thank you. I was going to ask about that. Cheers.

Kate Goldenring: So their WebAssembly, it can compile WebAssembly. It can also compile to a WASI compliant version of WebAssembly. And if you've heard WASI before, that stands for the WebAssembly systems interface.

So it's a set of interfaces that describe how a WebAssembly module can have access to host resources such as IO, networking, et cetera. 

Chris Adams: Okay.

Kate Goldenring: So different languages have better support for that as well.

Chris Adams: All right. So can I come in just, so can I come in just one second there? Because you've got me quite excited now, the idea that, okay, I don't need to learn a new language and me basically spending 10 years or 15 years, in my case, trying to get kind of basically some more competent Python. I don't need to throw that away.

And other people can, in whatever languages they use, they can also use that. And I think you said something quite interesting about, like, I know that under the hood, when I'm coding in Python, really something's being compiled down to some kind of like assembly. As for example, but I know that when I was using my, I'm using a MacBook right now, which has a Mac chip, and previously I had like an Intel Mac.

And then I had all these problems because there's different bits of, there's different architecture that these have. And I know that when I'm pushing code into say cloud sometimes. I'll be told that, "Oh, this doesn't work because you're not using an Intel machine." How does this relate there? Because it sounded like there was one kind of binary to like rule them all.

But I'm, I'm not, is it really like that? That sounds kind of quite helpful. And I'm, I would appreciate that, but that sounds a bit too good to be true, basically.

Kate Goldenring: I think it is good and it is true,

Chris Adams: Oh, wow.

Kate Goldenring: So, the thing about a browser is that it has to be able to run on all these different operating systems. So the code that runs in it needs to be able to do the same. And so WebAssembly, that .wasm file that you've compiled your application to, can run on pretty much the majority of operating systems and platforms.

So, Windows, Linux.

Chris Adams: I see.

Kate Goldenring: Et cetera. also like 64 architectures, ARM architectures, et cetera. You can execute that same .wasm file. And we're going back to like the people listening to this, who are passionate about green technology. This means there's no more cross builds. So if you think about how much your GitHub runners or whatever CI you're using, how they have to build everything for all these different

Chris Adams: all those

matrixes, like all for a version of Python that go, okay. All right. So you get rid of, wow. Okay. Yeah. Okay. I didn't know that hadn't actually picked up on that. And when you say this WASI thing, so if you are used to Linux or even Unix, there's this thing, idea of like POSIX compliant, right? Where

they're all going to talk to like a foster in more or less the same way. Is that kind of comparable? Was that generally the idea for that as well?

Kate Goldenring: People will definitely compare WASI to POSIX and I think there is some comparison there for sure. WASI is definitely different in that it is a set of interfaces. So, it's basically defining a contract or an interface between a WebAssembly module and the host, or even another WebAssembly module. And this is where we get maybe into something that is called the component model, which we don't need to dig into, but it's providing a new way of building applications so that these different languages can actually talk to each other within an application.

So you can imagine a universal URL library that's maybe built in Python, but can be called from Rust. And that's by adding a wrapper of the component model on top of a WebAssembly module, and they're all talking through these interfaces. And yeah, WASI describes a set of interfaces and actually. 0. 2 of WASI was just released, and that was a huge milestone.

It happened only a month ago, and that has promoted the standardization and the stabilization of these interfaces. So we now have a stable release that you can target with all of these interfaces and you can find them within the WASI repo, what exactly those interfaces are

and what capabilities it provides.

Chris Adams: Okay. So if I understand it, that's basically, so this, why is he thinking? Yes, it's a little bit like POSIX, but it's, it's, it's a bit more involved in that. Like it's, the idea would be that you could have that connect to maybe another system with a kind of predefined way. So rather than me having to kind of send a bunch of json in a serialized fashion, then you have to un serialize it, there's like predefined ways of these talking to each other.

Okay. I think I understand where you're going with that. And that does sound quite attractive. And that sounds useful to someone who's a developer or making some stuff here. Now, I understand that you are working on some of this yourself, and I understand that there is a, that you're, you're using one platform that, so I think when you showed me this talk, when you responded in this forum, you pointed to a talk with a platform called Fermyon Cloud, which does cover a sub, a couple of these languages that lets you run things in this new framework, Wasm thing, for example, could you maybe talk a little bit about,

about that part of what the experience looks like, cause I just, it has me quite curious and I assure you, we'll get back to other things, but that was, did sound kind of cool. And I just want to go down that rabbit hole for a second, if I may, actually.

Kate Goldenring: Yeah, and I think I've been painting this beautiful picture of WebAssembly, but it is still a fairly nascent technology. And so Fermyon is the company I work for, and we were really excited about simplifying the developer experience. So having someone come in and say, "Hey, I want to use this WebAssembly technology.

How can I use it?" And so if you're familiar with Docker, which kind of created that experience for containers. They created this Docker build, Docker run experience. We wanted to do that for WebAssembly with also the step of helping you even create that application. And so the open source tool for this that we've created is called spin and it is becoming the way to build serverless WebAssembly applications.

And so just with a simple spin new, you'll have templates that pop out for all these different languages. So we have 10 different languages that you can scaffold an application for. And there's SDKs for Rust, Go, Python, JavaScript.

Chris Adams: Ah, I see.

Kate Goldenring: Yeah, so now you've created this application, you've scaffold it, and then you can do a spin build and a spin up and run it locally. And remember, this is very universal. So whether Windows or Linux, et cetera, you can run it and then you can do a spin cloud deploy and deploy it to Fermyon cloud where we can host your applications and it's free and you can even share it with someone or if you use Kubernetes you can deploy it there.

So we're really trying to simplify the developer experience of using WebAssembly and also running it in your place of choice.

Chris Adams: Okay. You said a couple of things that caught my interest there. So first of all, yes, there is basically a tool, a little like how I might use Fly, Kotal, like to make an app or Heroku or basically some CLI to create a kind of harness for me to be developing in. And then I push to cloud, and presumably like Fermyon cloud, that's maybe a paid service or something like that.

But you said I can run it on Kubernetes, which isn't necessarily run by yourselves. And you, I think in the demo, you showed me, I think the demo I saw was running on Nomad, which is a service that we use as well, where I work basically. So. You're not tied to any particular platform and once something is in this kind of Wasm format, you could have it in a number of different places that do serverless.

You're not tied to like one ginormous provider or maybe two or three massive hyperscalers. You've got a bit of freedom in who you choose to work with in that scenario. Yeah.

Kate Goldenring: Yeah, and I think that is what is really exciting also about this wave of serverless is the cross platform agnosticity of your, your bytecode that you've created. So this same dot Wasm file ideally isn't locked into one cloud, so you can run it on Fermyon cloud, or you can run it on AKS's WASI node pools, or you can run it on other serverless platforms or locally and that same

application shouldn't be locked into anywhere because we're using the standard interfaces to run it. And so I think that's very exciting because what made Kubernetes so powerful was that people could switch from one cloud provider to the other. They didn't feel locked into their decision, and that's what was able to spread and kind of evangelize that kind of cloud computing.

And so I think the lack of vendor lock in is very powerful here.

Chris Adams: Okay. All right. So that's quite helpful. And this actually opens the door for some of the kind of, well, something we spoke about last week with on the last episode, there were some people talking about a company called Civo, I think Civo, who we talk about pools of resources, and we were joking about pools of resources in literal swimming pools, because they have a whole thing where they basically run computers

which generated lots and lots of waste heat, somewhere where the actual heat is useful. Because, the swimming pools would typically need to be, basically get the heat from somewhere. And they often do it by burning lots and lots of gas. So, the idea was by having something like a kind of, something which was kind of compliant in this way.

I think they run like a bunch of Kubernetes boxes somewhere, for example, and they don't literally put it in the bottom of this room for like some kind of piratical servers treasure chest. It's actually like, it's somewhere near, but this is one way of actually systemically thinking about some of the outputs from computing and basically doing it in a more kind of environmentally sustainable fashion.

It sounds like basically tools like this, or even serverless like that, you can run in these places. And that's actually one of the options.

Kate Goldenring: Yeah, I think, I think you're talking about Deep Green and that,

that work with, and we actually use Deep Green with spin applications. You have access to all these external resources cause they themselves are stateless, but you can still attach them to key value stores, SQL stores. And another resource we've provided is LLM inferencing on some GPUs that is powered by Deep Green.

And like you say, they're submerged in pools. And I believe. in vats of oil. And that captures first in the oil, then in the pool, like in a confined space. And that captures that heat externality and powers a pool. So I get very excited about the idea of capturing that externality of that compute. And yeah.

Chris Adams: Okay, cool. That sounds, all right. I'm glad you mentioned some of that because this is something we're trying to figure out because when, when we, if you listen to the episode last week, it sounds like we think that the servers are literally at the bottom of the pool. And obviously that that's not how it really works, but basically there is some way of using some of the heat from that.

Okay. All right. So I think I've got a good understanding of this, of where WebAssembly might fit into this. And I can see why when you make something, which is easy to run in lots and lots of places, then you can reduce the amount of hardware needed, but you can also reduce some of the impact that it might have by putting it in a, in a place that's more, I guess, sympathetically designed to like it's surrounding, for example, rather than venting heat into the sky, you're putting it, you're making use, you know, a sensible use of that heat.

Okay. Can I just talk about something else as well? Because. We've spoken about efficiency so far, mainly in terms of matching different peaks, going up and down and everything like that and averaging this out. So that's like one option. But I think that one thing I saw you speak about, which was a new concept to me, that I just want to like check if I understand it correctly.

You spoke about this idea of over subscription or soft allocation. So you've got servers and scaling them up and down. That's one way that you might make better use of the resources. But the other one, and I'm going to try and use a gym analogy, because I think that was what I thought of when you spoke about this.

You said like, if you go to a gym there's like more memberships that get sold than the amount of kit that's inside it. So if everyone all tried to like use the same machine at the same time, it would work and there'd be massive fights. But because people aren't using them all at the same time, you, people kind of, you can almost oversubscribe and oversell some of this.

And in the context of computing, you see something a little bit like this. So you might have like a physical server with, I don't know, let's call it say 32 gigabytes of RAM and 16 cores. Let's pretend it like a few years ago, right? And rather than only allocating 32 gigabytes worth of, of servers or programs and 16 cores, you do more than that.

You'd over allocate that. This idea of over subscription is a, is a common way to make better use of the existing hardware resources. Maybe you could talk a little bit about that because. I don't think this is something that people are that aware of. And in many cases, if you think about how you might allocate the environmental impact to a server to do some calculations, you might not be aware of how many other machines are really running on that computer.

It's not a one to one mapping in all these cases. I think that's my understanding. Maybe you could shed some light on that because this is something that I think a lot of people don't have too much exposure to.

Kate Goldenring: Yeah, I, I really like that gym analogy. And I think that idea is that say I haven't... that 32 gigabyte and 16 core machine and I deploy a thousand applications to it. If all 1, 000 got a request at the same time, some would be slowed, some would not succeed because there's not enough resources on that machine.

But I'm making a statistical bet here and it's informed. Usually you do some sort of understanding of traffic flows. That no, they're not all going to receive requests at the same time. In fact, I'm expecting only 30 percent to be running at once. I don't know. That's a random number. But because of that, you're able to over, you're over oversubscribing that machine. And what the result of this is, is that I'm using one machine instead of two or three, which is very exciting. And the reason, the only way you can do this is if you know that when it's not being used, it's not at the gym. So the key to this is that you leave the gym when you're not at the gym. And so you need a technology that does that.

Something that actually can scale to zero. And in the past, we've been oversubscribing already with technologies that at least scale down. And even microservices, when they're not in use, are scaled down. They're just kind of idly sitting there using less resources. And if we put this in a formulaic terms there, you were saying measuring is something that we like to do, and in measuring our software carbon intensity, the Green Software Foundation has that Software Carbon Intensity formula,

and that is a sum of operational emissions and embodied emissions, and it is very clear that you reduce operational emissions by not running your application. When you're not using it, so by leaving the gym,

but actually by oversubscribing, we're also reducing embodied emissions by having higher density and not needing as many servers. And so I think this whole concept can help us decrease our software carbon intensity.

Chris Adams: I see. Okay. And that degree to how much you're oversubscribing is like, that's flexible. For example, you might choose to massively oversubscribe and just accept that the performance might be a little bit ropey or in some cases, or you might be a bit more conservative in which case you're probably going to be using a bit more hardware, but you're going to have more of a guarantee that these things will work at their speed,

at the desired speed. And that was probably the approach that we've taken over the last 10 years, but there are new approaches available, like you're describing with Wasm and stuff like that. All right.

Kate Goldenring: Yeah, exactly. And I think when I talk about it being something that is hopefully it informs decision on how much to oversubscribe. We personally did load testing. So I had a fairly small machine, like eight cores, 32 gigabytes, and just a hundred gigabytes of disk and just threw as many applications as we could on there. Figured out what that density limit was and then hit it with a bunch of requests and a loader and a prober to try and figure out what are we comfortable with and setting our own limit there. And so I think everyone has to do that to kind of figure out what that, that important level of density is for them.

Chris Adams: Okay, cool. Thank you for explaining some of that. For those who are listening, we've linked to a couple of papers specifically about this. There's one by a gentleman called Noman Bashir, who has written a bit about how this over subscription thing works. And we'll also link to this paper. There's lots of reasons you might be ambivalent about Facebook, but the paper, this XFaaS paper is actually quite interesting.

And the thing that, one of the things that's interesting in the context of CarbonAware software is that, well, they, this idea that you might over subscribe and rather than that, you might also kind of offload to entirely separate data centers as another strategy to kind of keep serving things when maybe other parts of the kind of fleet of machines that are able to kind of pick some of that up, especially if they are maybe low carbon intensity because they're running a particularly green part of the grid, for example.

Okay. All right then. So we've covered quite a lot of ground and quite a lot of, you know, quite detailed concepts here. And we're definitely going to link to a bunch of papers for this. I wanted to just actually ask you about, about this, cause you mentioned a little bit about Fermyon and you mentioned a little bit about WASI and some of these tools.

If people are curious about some of this, where would you suggest people look? Because until I actually had this call with you, I knew there was a thing called Wasm. I knew like, it's this thing that I've seen in Pyodide as a way of like running Python in the browser. And I kind of understand that, but I didn't know where to start.

And it sounds like you don't need to be writing everything in Rust, so you can do things that you could write in, like, can you write in JavaScript, for example, to have something run that runs on a platform like this, for example?

Kate Goldenring: Exactly. You can use JavaScript. And if you want to try this out with Spin, Spin is on GitHub, but also Fermyon.com will lead it to you or developer.fermyon.Com as well. And. JavaScript works there, and we've simplified that experience by we have actually plugins to help you compile it to WebAssembly, and so you just install the plugin for that language, and then the spin build works correctly for you, and you can then immediately run it.

And so it really is hopefully making that experience easier. Simpler and, and getting you going and it is an open source community. So if you are an open source developer and want to contribute, we have a discord that you can join to join the discussion, or if you have an issue, put up the issue or even maybe grab one too.

So we're really trying to grow the ecosystem. And I think we have around 75 contributors currently, but we're always looking for more hands.

Chris Adams: Okay, cool. All right. We're just going to wrap this up. And I know there will be at least one person asking, how do I do some of this work and make sure it runs in a swimming pool? Not in a swimming pool, but in a kind of very, very green fashion. If you would be able to share a link for that for the show notes, I'd be very, very grateful because that sounds kind of cool.

And the idea of putting computers in lots of new places where the heat is useful rather than a waste sounds kind of exciting to me.

Kate Goldenring: Happy to do that.

Chris Adams: Okay, cool. All right then. So we spoke a little bit about... okay, this is like a kind of serverless that's somewhat flexible and quite resource efficient. And one thing that I think you demonstrated, which caught my eye was you were spinning up how many, it was like a thousand applications on your laptop to demonstrate that, yeah, you can run serverless in lots of places.

Can I just actually ask you a little bit, how about that came about because it was a pretty cool demo and it was lots of fun and I haven't seen nerds clap over for a demo for a while, but it was really, really nice actually.

Kate Goldenring: Yeah, so I hinted a little bit about the motivation for that, and that was to figure out how much we could handle in our cloud. So I was tasked with load testing our cloud and basically coming up with a number of, this is the size of our instances we use, and, and how many applications can we put on each instance.

And so, as you pointed out, I was using Nomad there, and we basically had a multi tenant version of Spin that had a listener for every single application that was deployed. And then just deployed as many applications as we could on my laptop, my poor laptop, until it couldn't handle it anymore and just cleaned it with a bunch of requests. And that was all in the vein of trying to figure out how dense we could go.

Chris Adams: That was really useful for me to know because I, until I'd seen that, I generally assumed that serverless almost always means either some massive, chunky Kubernetes cluster, or it's going to be some proprietary tool that, okay, I understand why they're, they're, they're necessary, but that makes you feel a little bit uncomfortable about, okay, this is my future is only one provider, for example, that provided a bit of freedom on that.

Okay. Brandy, if people wanted to follow your work, for example, where would you direct people's attention to? Cause we're just coming up to time and this has been lots and lots of fun and I've really enjoyed seeing some of your talks and some of the things you've been writing about. And I suspect there may be other, other ones as well, because yeah, this has been really helpful for me.

Kate Goldenring: Yeah. I tend to try to promote the interesting things I find or I'm putting out there on my LinkedIn predominantly and sometimes on X as well. And both of those are just my full name, Kate Goldenring, as the handle. But if you want to talk more specifically and personally about a question, I'm on the CNCF Slack, the Kubernetes Slack, Bytecode Alliance's Zulip, and then if you're just interested in following blogs about WebAssembly and Serverless, Fermyon, we have a pretty active blog on our, our website, so just.

permian. com, you can find it. And so, and that's where we can find more out more about those swimming pools that we have some GPUs running in.

Chris Adams: Okay. Kate, well, this was lots and lots of fun. I really enjoyed it. And I, if nothing else, I enjoyed actually reading all the papers and learning so much about this. So, Kate, it should be coming up to eight o'clock for you. So I should probably say, have a lovely day and thank you very much for that. Kate, I really enjoyed this and I learned a bunch of new things about serverless, scaling up, scaling down, gyms, swimming pools, and Wasm. Thanks, Kate.

Kate Goldenring: Thank you so much, Chris.

Chris Adams: 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!

We're gearing up for the return of Carbon Hack 24 happening from March 18 to April 8, 2024. This year we're focusing on the Impact Framework, aiming to innovate how we measure the environmental impact of software. It's a chance for engineers, designers, and creators to dive into challenges, ranging from plugin development to non-technical content creation. We're inviting students too, with special categories just for them. Join us to push the boundaries of sustainable software. For details on how to register or to become a sponsor, check out the link below:

Register at https://grnsft.org/hack/podcast 👈

Find out more about Impact Framework:

• Environment Variables Episode 58: BETA Impact Framework

If you enjoyed this episode then please either:

• Follow, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts
• Follow and rate on Spotify
• Watch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!
• Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!
  
  

TRANSCRIPT BELOW:
Asim Hussain: Hey everyone, Asim here. Carbon Hack is back this year. The hackathon will take place from Monday, March the 18th to Monday, April the 8th, 2024. Carbon Hack 24 is all about redefining the way we measure software to reduce its environmental impact. footprint. At the heart of this hackathon is Impact Framework, an open source tool that lets you compute and report the environmental impacts of software applications accurately.


It takes observations you can easily gather about running systems such as CPU utilization, page views, or number of installs, or anything else, and converts them into environmental impacts like carbon, water, energy, air quality, in an auditable, replicable, verifiable, and transparent way. With Impact Framework, if we can observe something, we can measure its impacts.


If you want to find out more about what the Impact Framework does, you can listen to episode 58 of Environment Variables. 


Why the focus on measurement, you might ask? Well, we've learned that at the intersection of software and sustainability, measurement is the compass guiding our way. How we measure software's environmental impact is more than just a technical detail. It's the key to unlocking the magnitude of change we can achieve. 


Here's the challenge. Alone or in small teams, participants will have the freedom to choose from a variety of prize categories, including Best Plugin. Impact Framework itself is just very, very simple. The power of Impact Framework is its plugin ecosystem. We've got plugins which take CPU utilization and turn it into energy. We've got plugins that take energy and turn it into carbon. We need more and more and more of these plugins to be built for my statement I said previously to be true, to take any observation and convert it into environmental impacts. We need plugins for that. So one of our prize categories is best plugin. We want you to build the best plugin you can build. If you submit your plugin idea on the Hack website, We actually nurture you, we help you, we guide you towards designing a plugin which has the best possible chance of winning.


There's another prize category called Beyond Carbon, which I'm very, very excited about. If you can build a plugin which outputs an environmental impact that's not carbon, for instance, water. You can submit your solution to the Beyond Carbon prize category. We really want to move the conversation beyond carbon this year. That's my personal goal. 


This year, we've also got prize categories for non technical contributions. We've got a best content category. This is a category for people who would create the best piece of content, be it a how to video or a tutorial or a written booklet on how to use Impact Framework in any context, be it for a particular domain or in a generic sense, that's what best content is all about. How we're also expanding best content is if you're going to write a case study that uses Impact Framework to measure the impact of something and you write up that case study in such a way that it becomes a learning resource that also counts for best content as well. 


We also want to encourage people to contribute to the framework itself. The framework is a piece of code which sits on the Green Software Foundation's GitHub repository. And if you can contribute to that code by going to our GitHub repository and picking up an issue and saying, I would like to work on this issue for the hackathon. Please go right ahead and we'll nurture you, we'll guide you, we'll support you because we want to make sure your contribution is accepted. But that is how you can submit the best contribution category. 


And this year we're thrilled to open our doors to students. We have two prize categories for students. We have an undergraduates category. If your entire team is made up of undergraduates, you can then win a set separate accessory prize for undergraduates.


And again, if your entire team is made up of under 18s, we also have another prize just for you, an under 18s prize. 


So how can you become part of CarbonHack24? It's as simple as signing up on our website at grnsft.org/hack/podcast that's grnsft.org GRN SFT. org forward slash hack forward slash podcast.


There you'll find all the details about the event registration and upcoming live sessions where I'll be talking every single Monday, giving you an overview of the hackathon, what's going on the latest information and just taking you some of the latest projects. This is your opportunity to be part of a global movement that's shaping the future of sustainable software. 


We also extend a warm invitation to organizations that align with our vision to join us as sponsors. This is your chance to witness early stage innovations, connect with talented individuals, and showcase your commitment. If you're interested in sponsorship, visit the same link, which is grnsft.org/hack/podcast. 


I'm thrilled about CarbonHack24. We're going to explore innovative ways to measure the environmental impact of software. Join us for three weeks of exciting challenges where engineers, designers, and content creators will use Impact Framework to measure software's environmental footprint.


We can't wait to see what innovations and solutions emerge from this incredible event. See you there.

This Week in Green Software, host Chris Adams is joined by Gabi Beyer and Brendan Kamp from re:cinq to talk about the recent initiatives to and consequences of the prolonging of the lifecycle of technology. The challenges of measuring carbon emissions in personal laptops and cloud services are discussed, highlighting the complexities of quantifying environmental impact, as well as companies reporting on these metrics. Tune in for a lively discussion on sustainable software development.

Learn more about our people:

• Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | Website
• Gabi Beyer: LinkedIn | GitHub
• Brendan Kamp: LinkedIn | GitHub | Website

Find out more about the GSF:

• The Green Software Foundation Website 
• Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter

News:

• £200m Octopus backing to heat up pioneering Deep Green tech [11:36]
• 2nd-hand phone market hurt by users sweating devices longer • The Register [13:53]
• Google endorses Right-to-Repair law in Oregon • The Register [17:24]
• Chromebook expiration date, repair issues 'bad for people and planet' [18:16]
• Google promises decade of updates for newer Chromebooks • The Register
• Fit for 55 - The EU's plan for a green transition - Consilium [20:07]
• The anti-greenwashing rule: Proposed FCA guidance | South Africa | Global law firm | Norton Rose Fulbright [20:18]
• Baselining Software Carbon Emissions - A Use Case by UBS | GSF [20:54]
• Perf-icient Measuring of Laptop Energy Consumption and CO2e | re:cinq [21:48]
• ABN AMRO Embarks on Hybrid Cloud Transformation [24:54]
• GitHub - re-cinq/cloud-carbon: A open telemetry exporter to calculate the carbon emissions generated by your cloud infrastructure [25:46]
• Amazon claims it was the world's largest buyer of renewable energy in 2023 [26:41]
• How much power do hyperscalers use, and how much would it cost to go fossil-free 24 / 7 ? | Chris Adams [27:57]
• https://github.com/Green-Software-Foundation/real-time-cloud/issues/20 [30:59] 
• Tripling the lifespan of servers: why we retrofitted 14,000 servers | Scaleway [35:39]

Events:

• Carbon Hack 24: Where measurement meets innovation, and impact knows no bounds [39:52] 

Resources:

• Civo.com [07:26]
• Leaf.cloud [08:06]
• What Is Embodied Carbon? And What Does it Have To Do With Sustainable Software? | re:cinq 
• GitHub - re-cinq/cloud-carbon: A open telemetry exporter to calculate the carbon emissions generated by your cloud infrastructure
• https://github.com/Green-Software-Foundation/policy-wg/issues/59 [24:19] 
• Projects | GSF [26:16]
• The Week in Green Software: Code Green and Clean Power | GSF [31:15] 

If you enjoyed this episode then please either:

• Follow, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts
• Follow and rate on Spotify
• Watch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!

Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!

TRASNCRIPT BELOW:

Brendan Kamp: Transparency, right? I mean, this is the key for the cloud providers, I feel, at the moment, is just become more transparent about some of the, this data so that we can do the work to calculate, but just give us the data to do it, right?

Chris Adams: 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, Chris Adams. Hello, and welcome to another episode of Environment Variables, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams. We don't shy away from diving into the details of sustainability in software development in this podcast. But if we want this to be a field that has widespread adoption, we need to make sure there's space for people entering the field from the wider digital sector, rather than being a specialist place that only really accepts people who have a PhD in green IT already. And it's also good to know about what's happening in the wider world, too. So last year, we started a new format of this podcast that we call This Week in Green Software, which was a sort of roundup of stories and links related to. Yes, you guessed it, Green Software, often with members of the Green Software Foundation coming in to share some of their stories that caught their eyes. It's New Year, and this is our first This Week in Green Software episode. And today, I'm joined by two members of re:cinq, one of the latest organizations to join the Green Software Foundation. So, I'm joined by Brendan Kamp and Gabi Beyer of re:cinq. Hi folks!

Brendan Kamp: Hi, nice to be here.

Gabi Beyer: Hi. Hello.

Chris Adams: Cool. Alright, so, I'm not normally sure who to give the floor to first in introductions like this. So I'm just gonna go for like, alphabetical sort here, which I think places Brendan slightly ahead of Gabi in this one, right? So Brendan, are you okay just introducing yourself and what you do at re:cinq?

Brendan Kamp: Yeah. First time I'm ahead of Gabi in anything, so I'm happy. So I'm Brendan. I'm a founding engineer at re:cinq. So I've mostly in my career worked with platforms and system level stuff. I did a small sense of developments on apps and I've recently just started learning about green software. And so I've started a blog forum called thegreencoder.io to capture all the learnings and things that I've been doing.

Chris Adams: Cool. Alright, thank you for that Brendan. And Gabi, I think you're next in the sorting order, so yeah, over to you.

Gabi Beyer: Yeah, so I'm Gabi. I'm also an engineer at re:cinq. I've done a bunch of different types of engineering over my years from Linux to platform to now doing green coding and optimization engineering. And recently we actually, Brendan and I both got accepted to do a talk at KubeCon, so we're excited for that.

Chris Adams: Oh wow, congrats! I need to check. Where is KubeCon taking place this year? Because I, I'm a little out of date when it comes to knowing where that massive conference moves around the world.

Gabi Beyer: Yeah, it's in Paris.

Chris Adams: In Paris? Oh, wow. That's not that far from Berlin. Maybe we'll see you in person in that case.

Gabi Beyer: That'd be great. 

Chris Adams: Yeah, congratulations.

All right. Okay, so thank you for that, Gabi. Brendan, during our intro call, just to get to know each other and figure out what we're going to talk about, you mentioned that you're joining this call from the Netherlands. But you haven't always lived in the Netherlands. And you even mentioned living on a farm at one point before. So before we dive into the world of like your life with servers, maybe we could talk a little bit about Brendan pre-cloud or some of that first, before we dive into the nerdery.

Brendan Kamp: Yeah, perfect. Well, so I've lived on a couple of farms. The first one in South Africa, I was born on a farm. And then a couple of years ago, I think it's about six years ago now, we moved to Germany. Didn't enjoy Germany, so we decided to, mid pandemic, do the only option of going into the middle of nowhere, Norway, and living just on the edge of a fjord in Norway for a couple of years.

So yeah, and now jumping back to Amsterdam to get a bit more into the fray of things again.

Chris Adams: So let me just get this. So South Africa, very, very warm. Germany can be freaking cold, but also kind of warm. And you thought, "nah, this is too warm and temperate for me. I'm going to go all the way to Norway," where you're like, "ah, this is maybe a bit too cold." And now you're back in

Brendan Kamp: Too cold. Yes. A hundred percent. Definitely a weather thing.

Chris Adams: Well, I could sympathize with that as someone who's been living in Germany for the last 10 years and seeing a kind of recent cold snap, but also it getting chuffing hot over the summer, or comparatively speaking for Germany, at least. All right. And Gabi, when we were chatting about this inside the CNCF Slack, which is the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Slack, I think, I saw your profile photo and I saw that you had a bike, but you also had a adorable dog on there. I guess there's a story there too, before we dive into the world of servers.

Gabi Beyer: Yes, that is Bruce. He is famous among all of my friends, and he is 13 now. He, I'm from Seattle, and he came with me to the Netherlands. And yeah, he is enjoying cycling around the city just as much as I am.

Chris Adams: Oh wow, so he's got a little dog passport and doggy visa and stuff like that, right?

Gabi Beyer: Whole European passport.

Chris Adams: Oh wow, that's cool. All right, thank you. And hello, Bruce, if you're listening, I suppose. All right. Okay, so thank you very much for giving us the time and introducing yourselves. Folks, if you haven't listened to this podcast before, my name is Chris.

I am the executive director of the Green Web Foundation, which is a Dutch nonprofit focused on an entirely fossil-free internet. I also work as one of the chairs of the Green Software Foundation's Policy Working Group, which basically does stuff related to new legislation, figuring out how to interact with new laws being made, and also creating some kind of fora for people who are basically trying to figure out how to deal with green software at a kind of legislation level. We also do a bunch of other things at the Green Web Foundation, but I'll maybe mention those as we discuss. All right, then. So, Brendan, Gabi, I assume you're sitting comfortably, right?

Gabi Beyer: Oh Yeah. 

Brendan Kamp: Ready. 

Chris Adams: Okay, cool. All right, just before we start, sorry, I almost forgot. While we talk about this, we will mention a few stories.

We will link to all of these in a transcript and some show notes at the end of this podcast. But we also will have these as a markdown file on GitHub. So if there's a mistake for anyone who's listening to these, or there's something that you didn't quite understand, you can totally submit a pull request to improve it.

And we will thank you in the next episode for your diligence in helping capture knowledge for future listeners. Alright, okay then, I guess we can start with the news stories, Gabi, the first one, I think we spoke about this before, this is one that I might let you kind of talk about first I suppose. This is Deep Green, which is the company based in the UK who put servers I think at the bottom of swimming pools, or in swimming pools where they use the waste heat to heat the swimming pool so you don't need to burn gas to heat the swimming pool, but that also has a nice effect of cooling the servers themselves. They've been doing a bit of work with a cloud provider called Civio, and I found out about this through, there's a serverless provider called Fermyon who are doing some really interesting stuff with scale to zero servers. And I think a bunch of this stuff seems to be running on Kubernetes. I imagine this, between the two of us, Gabi, you might have some exposure to.

I've got to ask, first of all, have you used any kind of serverless tools in the first place like this? And do you think this is a trend that we're going to see more of, this idea of the cloud not just being in gigantic data centers, but in some cases at the bottom of swimming pools where the heat is actually being used in a productive way rather than being vented into the sky?

Gabi Beyer: Yeah, I think that it's a great initiative. We actually, Brendan and I attended a talk a couple of months ago about a Dutch company doing a very similar thing called Leafcloud, and they would put them also in pools. They've created, I think, a heater that yeah, would take the energy from servers and transform them into heat for pools and also apartment buildings. So they're putting them into apartment complexes to heat the housing. 

Brendan Kamp: I was always wondering, cause Gab's kind of explained this a little bit when we were there, but I was always wondering how they do the security side of things. Right? I mean, data centers are generally these walled off environments where you're storing companies' data. So understanding the technology underneath that to kind of like not allow those kinds of intrusions.

I mean, that must be phenomenal. Right?

Yeah, 

Chris Adams: This is actually one thing where I'm moving out of my expertise, but I do know that this is actually something that is an ongoing challenge when you think about edge and stuff like that, because most of the time you, like you say, people talk about data centers as big buildings with big scary dogs and men, often with like some kind of weaponry patrolling these, and this shifts to a wider, more distributed set of places does mean that you might think about physical security differently to some of the other ones. Now, my understanding so far is that there is a bunch of different forms of encryption used so that the actual content is not particularly readable in many cases. But this is also something that, because we're on a podcast and there's more than just the three of us involved in this conversation, albeit many of them more passively at the moment, something we can find a bit more about or even raise in future, because you're right, Brendan, this is going to come up again and again and again. I'm also glad, Gabi, that you mentioned Leafcloud, because I'm actually quite a fan of them, because as I understand it, Leafcloud offer things like, compute as a service, storage as a service, all the things that you might see from some of the big cloud providers. But, so it's the same kind of API, like I said, like the idea being that you don't need, you don't need to care where the cloud is. You just need to know that your tests pass or you're getting the same things responding. Maybe you could just touch on that a little bit more because I haven't actually used them myself but I did read over their website and they've got a cool domain.

I think it's leaf.cloud or something like that which definitely got some nerd points.

Gabi Beyer: Yeah, I actually haven't used it as well either, but talking with some of their engineers, I found them very interesting, along with the domain. They have some funny lunchtime antics that they seem to get along in. But as for the technology itself, I Yeah, I can't really speak to it because I've never used it as well. But to kind of go off of the security question or thought Brendan had, I'm under the assumption that they might, for both use cases, since the Fermyon one is serverless, I'm assuming that they don't store any data at these pool sites or at these hotel complexes.

And it's a lot of, they do still maybe have that big scary data center where they send all the data to, but yeah, the actual operations are occurring elsewhere.

Chris Adams: I see, okay, so maybe there's a thing where it's just being loaded into memory for a short period of time and then it's being processed and then the results are being put back somewhere else, back into somewhere else in the cloud where it's somewhere more durable. Well, I guess there must be some people who seem to be okay with this because Deep Green, in the last literally couple of weeks, there was a really interesting announcement. They raised 200 million pounds for a massive raise to start rolling out these kinds of like integrated servers all around the UK. This was an investment by Octopus Energy, who are probably one of the kind of energy unicorns, I suppose, globally, basically. So that's something there, and we'll share a link to that as well.

So maybe we should ask one of them about, say," In your due diligence, how did you figure out how to answer this question? Because when we were looking at this, we thought this was cool, but we didn't quite figure out this part here." And that's probably the thing that we need to understand before we start diving into dropping servers at the bottom of swimming pools and getting them to execute cloud functions.

Brendan Kamp: Just like off the top of my head, this sounds, I mean, this sounds right in the realm of Kubernetes, right, where you have this idea of, you just have all these nodes everywhere, which would be the pools, right? Like these little servers are just nodes and you're just using them as a pool of resources that maybe you 

Chris Adams: Ba dum tss. Very good there. Yeah.

Brendan Kamp: Yeah.

Chris Adams: A literal swimming pool of resources. Yeah. Okay.

Brendan Kamp: Exactly right. Which makes sense why they would partner with Xevo, I think, cause I think Xevo is Kubernetes first provider,

Chris Adams: I think that is the case as well. Yeah. 

Brendan Kamp: Yeah, so, I mean, it sounds plausible, and I can kind of do the mental gymnastics to how it could work, but it would be so fascinating to see some white papers from these companies coming out and saying, this is how your data is secure, this is why you don't need to worry, right?

Chris Adams: Well, I'm glad you mentioned that because we actually have a future episode with Kate Goldenring of Fermyon, who basically was one of the first people to respond when I asked some really nerdy questions on the Green Software Foundation discussion board about "how do people do isolation for this?"

Because one of the things about some of these serverless tools is figuring out, "okay, how do you make sure that when you're running some code, you're not being affected by other people's noisy neighbors" and stuff like that, basically. So yeah, we will definitely be diving into that into almost excruciating detail in a future episode.

So yeah, I'll be looking forward to that. Okay! Thank you for that, Gabi. This was fun. Okay, next story that we had on this was this one in the register, actually. So this was about users now keep cell phones for 40 plus months, and this is hurting the second-hand market, apparently. So this is one thing that, Brendan, I was thinking of you when this story came up, because we have seen a slowdown in people buying new electronics, and actually this has been one of the real problems we've seen cited with embodied energy and embodied carbon and hardware. And now we've actually seen a new trend where people are not choosing to update their phones every year by the looks of things.

Brendan Kamp: I absolutely love the headline, because it's like, they're making it sound like such a negative thing. "Oh, you're crashing this whole market of secondhand users," whereas you're just utilizing your resources for a longer time, right? And so, I mean, when I was going down the rabbit hole of embodied carbon, cell phones and laptops were one of the things that majority of the carbon emitted for these devices is in the manufacturing side of things and not actually in the electricity usage. So extending the lifespan of these devices just by, I think it 

Chris Adams: one of the best things you can do. Yeah.

Brendan Kamp: Yeah, exactly, exactly. But it's also going to hurt the companies that make the devices, right? And I think that's where there's the struggle, is "how do we still keep this growth going for these companies so that they can innovate, they can like do these things, but not destroy the world by littering it full of. 

Chris Adams: Almost. Yeah. 

Brendan Kamp: Exactly. Yeah.

Chris Adams: So I just realize that we're talking about this and you've used this term 'embodied carbon' that may be new to people. So when you say the word embodied carbon, I assume you're talking about the fact, I mean, you did a quite good job of explaining this, the idea that if you're going to have a phone, because loads of energy goes into making that phone, like you need to heat sand up to like 1200 degrees Celsius to make a silicone crystal before you can slice it and then turn it into a chip. That's going to be a bunch of energy used there. And that's usually come from fossil fuel sources, so that's the embodied carbon that you're referring to in that context, right?

Brendan Kamp: Yeah. A hundred percent. And it's also, they try and include the other things in terms of like transportation of the device from the manufacturing plant to the sales warehouses, the end of life, carbon footprint, and all of these they try and calculate all together and they have this global term of embodied carbon. And for these devices, and you might need to check my data, but I think phones and laptops are like, 60 to 70 percent of their carbon emissions are wrapped up in their, in the embodied carbons, whereas servers, funnily enough, because of the immense power or energy that they use, it's only like 15 to 30 percent of their emissions. 

Chris Adams: So it's the other way around then. Alright. 

Brendan Kamp: Yeah. So servers, the embodied carbon isn't as big, but it's still a nice slice. And funnily enough, this is something that Gabi's and I have been struggling is how to calculate embodied carbon for like using of devices, right? So if you only use a device for a small amount of time, like how much of that embodied carbon pie is 

Chris Adams: is attributable to you, it's your share versus someone else's share, right?

Yeah, you do need to kind of, I mean, maybe this is actually one thing that we'll just touch on a little bit before, because, Brendan, what you mentioned just like, oh, it, you know, this, the, the framing of the story, like, "Dammit, these people should be consuming faster," right?

I think that's an interesting one because there's also one thing, one interesting development we've seen on the policy side is that Google, which the register always refers to as the chocolate factory, which always makes me giggle; they're one of the second firms now that has actually come around on right to repair.

So I think last year or the year before you had a whole bunch of actual shareholder activism. You had some people putting forward a kind of shareholder resolution to basically start looking into the ways to reduce the embodied carbon of owning a Microsoft Surface. And eventually it passed, despite there being a bit of pushback against management saying, "no, we don't want to do this." And now you saw Apple come around last year saying, "oh, we're kind of okay around this right to repair," but they had this whole notion of like parts pairing, which basically meant that it's right to repair as long as you only ever buy the parts from one provider at Apple's prices, which is probably good for Apple shareholders, but that does kind of mean that that is not possibly the intention of the, of this. And then Google have recently come through and said, "yeah we're actually coming around on this as well because we realize we've got loads of Chromebooks around and if we can fix them rather than replace them that might actually do something for the embedded carbon."

And also this whole parts pairing thing, which has been one of the last things that large tech firms want to hold on to, they've said, "yeah, we're okay with not having the parts pairing thing" as well, as I understand it. So this is actually an interesting development. I don't know if there's another loophole or something like that, but this really caught my eye and I figured it was, I was thinking of you when I read this actually, Brendan.

Brendan Kamp: But now also coming out with the new EU greenwashing laws that have recently been passed, for Google, I would assume this would start looking good for their data because very soon, these big corporate companies, if they want to do work in the EU, are going to have to start providing this kind of data of just how much emissions are their devices emitting, etc.

And if they are reusing, and I mean, I've always felt like this idea of "you can only use our things" is ridiculous, because, for instance, if your sole goal is to make money, it works, but now we're shifting to a world where there's other incentives, and if those incentives are, "hey, we want to reduce our carbon," then if a vendor is providing the hardware, those emissions are for the vendor, they're not for me, they don't go towards my numbers.

And this means that you have a more collaborative society. So yeah, I'm really interested to see where this goes, especially in the next couple of years, you know, Fit for 55, the new greenwashing laws, because I think these tech companies are going to really have to do some changes.

Chris Adams: All right, you've added a couple of things that, Gabi, I'm going to ask you a little bit about. So there's a couple of interesting terms that you mentioned there, so Fit for 55, this is one of the big announcements inside Europe to basically say "we're gonna reduce emissions by 55% by 2030." And there's a bunch of new laws and things tied to that.

And you also spoke about this anti-greenwashing resolution. We'll share a link to that 'cause I believe that was passed last week or the week before, inside European Parliament. So there's a few follow-on steps and essentially saying things are carbon neutral isn't going to fly unless you have a really, really clear way of backing it up.

So when Apple have mentioned things like they're having an entirely carbon neutral watch in Europe, that won't be a thing that you can do. And I imagine we might see this also percolating into other territories as well. All right then. So Gabi, there's a really interesting story here, which is the, this is actually UBS, the bank, who are basically saying, "Hi, we're trying to develop a baseline for some of our early steps." They used to talk a little bit about how this is quite hard. And as I understand it, you spent a bit of time, and you even wrote about your experiences, taking some steps to try and measure things just on a single laptop. Maybe we could talk about that before we speak more widely about this one here, because there's some really nice things to touch on for the UBS story, and they explain a few steps they've taken, but maybe we just touch on your experiences with your first steps and then go work a bit more widely because I think you did write about this after, was it the SDIA green coding workshop in Berlin? But I think you mentioned something that maybe you talk a little bit about that then we can go into the wider case here because it's very rare to see large organizations talking about this. And to get there, you need to figure out what to do on your own laptop first, right?

Gabi Beyer: Yeah. Yeah. Inspired by the SDIA. Yeah. I wanted to measure the carbon emissions and the energy consumption of different processes running on my laptop. And that was challenging enough in itself. And to do that, I used this Intel RAPL hardware component that can measure the energy, and I used Perf, which is also a Linux command line tool to, which utilizes RAPL, sorry, which then can get the amount of joules of energy a process is running. And then, once you can get that energy consumption, you must calculate it into kilowatt hours, and again, multiply it by the grid database, and you can get the carbon emissions. So there's a lot of steps just to get the energy consumption and carbon emission data for a single laptop. And to build off of that, we've been working a bit on figuring out how to measure cloud, different cloud services, their emissions, specifically like VMs, which is similar to what UBS seemed to do because they were running VMs for their application data. And that is another level of challenge because the hardware components are being shared within the services. So you have to kind of then determine how resources are being shared.

Chris Adams: Yeah, so it's not just a single laptop. It's like you're sharing your laptop. So if I understand it, so doing it, it's hard enough for you with a laptop when it's just you owning the laptop, when you don't have to share that laptop with other people. When you're looking at a server, the number of people who you're sharing it with could be changing over time. And that means that There's almost like a kind of integration, mathematical integration problem that you also need to wrestle with as well. And that's another thing that makes it somewhat more complicated.

Brendan Kamp: Or maybe just to touch on, also you did the CPU calculations for VMs, but what you're currently struggling with is memory, right? Because there's no data on memory.

Gabi Beyer: Yeah, that's specific to the cloud though. We don't have their, like, hardware memory information, like what kind of DDRs and RAM stuff they're utilizing. And each one kind of emits different energy usage depending on that. So it's kind of difficult to say, like, "this application is using this part of memory whereas this application is only using this much."

So that's been hard to calculate.

Chris Adams: It's a real challenge. Yeah. This is something that we've come across quite a few times. There is actually two things that may be worth touching on here, actually. So inside the Policy Working Group where we work, we've seen various sectors really struggling with trying to come up with some reliable numbers for this.

And there's actually a roundtable that we're organizing in the coming months specifically for the financial sector, because amongst all of the sectors so far, they're weirdly one of the more transparent so far. I think it's partly because they've bought so many servers already, because they, That they actually have access to these numbers, whereas some cloud providers don't have this, and we'll show a link to a post about, there's a bank called ABN AMRO.

They're the third largest bank in the Netherlands. They actually were on the record basically saying, look, we've looked at our figures and 40% of our emissions are attributable to our own infrastructure, and partly this because they own some of their own servers, and they're moving to the cloud, but this is one place where it actually has been easier for people to come up with these numbers.

But when you get to the cloud, it becomes, as you mentioned, it's way more complicated, because Gabi, you said, who's RAM? What's CPUs? What machine? The fact that you don't know where it is means it's really, really hard to model some of this stuff as well, actually. And, yeah, I think this is going to be an ongoing challenge.

But I wanted to ask you, actually, when you're on this, there's a project that I think I saw in the kind of recent GitHub repo called, I think, is it called Carbon Cloud? This is a Golang thing or something running on the server. Maybe one of you could talk a little bit about that because that caught my eye, basically.

Brendan Kamp: That's all Gabi.

Chris Adams: Yeah? Okay. So, Gaby, I'm curious, maybe you could talk a little bit about some of that, because it seems like you've tried to wrestle with some of these problems yourself, first hand.

Gabi Beyer: Yeah, we're trying to, written in Go, we're trying to measure the carbon intensity of cloud software. But our goal is mostly to do it in real time and to be able to provide like a metric that users and developers can utilize and get that quick feedback cycle loop to see what is changing and going on in their code base that could be producing these higher emissions or change in emissions and stuff like that.

Chris Adams: All right, cool. Well, in that case, one thing you may be interested in is, so in the GSF, there's a project called the Real-Time Cloud Project, which I've been involved with, and we'll talk on, talk about a little bit later, because this is one thing that, as someone who's working in an organization that cares about a fossil free internet, a significant chunk of that is going to be, well, decarbonizing the power. And this is one thing that we've struggled with as well. It's really, really hard to find the numbers for this kind of stuff. And that probably brings us to the story that I kind of put forward here. So there is a really interesting story from Data Center Dynamics about Amazon, basically saying they're claiming they're the world's largest buyer of renewable energy in 2023. They said this story and we'll share a link to this and it sounds, this sounds really, really good when you first think about it, right? Like they're a large provider, they, they basically mentioned that they've invested in something like more than 100 new solar and wind energy projects and stuff like that. This adds to a total of nearly more than 500 wind and solar projects globally, right? So these are the figures that we have here. And this sounds on the face of it kind of large if you were to assume how big Amazon is compared to other providers, right? And I've been really struggling to figure these figures out because if you look into sustainability reports from any of the large providers, Amazon, as one organization that hasn't really published its absolute energy use figures ever, or it's very, very hard to find this information.

If you sign an NDA, you might get the figures yourself, but most of us don't sign NDAs with Amazon because, well, I'm not spending 15,000 Euros at least each month with them myself. But, what we found out when I was doing some research into this was the Carbon Disclosure Project is one place where these figures are submitted.

So I did a bit of research myself and we've shared a link to this specifically. Google and Microsoft both published their CDP responses listing a bunch of really interesting answers to the questions and this is helpful because it allows us to have comparisons across each of these. And the short version of this is that when I looked into this, the figures for absolute energy use were about just under 40 terawatt hours, 39 terawatt hours, is what was listed inside this, which is, for most of us, we don't know what that figure would even kind of compare to, right?

Like, is it like, you know 'giga watts', 'gigawatts,' 'kagoolies,' like, what does that even mean? For context, Ireland, the entire country, used 34 terawatt hours of power in the same year as this reporting. So Amazon is basically, is using more power than Ireland, but they also in the Carbon Disclosure Project, they also list how much renewable energy they've used and therefore have purchased. And they've purchased 35 terawatt hours of clean energy. So that's, they've bought more clean energy on an annual basis than Ireland or the country has used in the same year, which is mind-blowing as a figure. And it kind of gives you an idea of the scale we're talking about here, for example. Brendan, you got something to come in there.

Brendan Kamp: Yeah, yeah. So I just have a question and I'd love to hear your opinion on this around carbon contracts, right? So my understanding of carbon contracts is you're buying energy that would be used by another company or green energy. And you're then saying, "all right, that is now my green energy." So it's not necessarily a reduction technique.

It's more of a auditing technique in my mindset.

Chris Adams: I see why you would say that. And to be honest, the market structure is such that it's actually quite complicated and not very accessible for most of us. All right. I think what you may be referring to are two separate things.

So if you want to report electricity usage and the carbon from electricity usage, there is a approach which is based on your usage tied to your location,

right? And there's another approach which is designed to recognize the fact that you've Bought a bunch of renewable energy. So one is called the market-based approach and one is called the location-based approach for this. And one of the challenges that we've had over the last 10 years is that you can basically buy power and separately from your use of that power, you can just buy some certificates that have been sold by a bunch of green energy producers.

Because it may be that in certain parts of the world, people don't value those certificates, and then you can then apply that to your usage to then say, "well, this is quote unquote Green Power." This has been the approach that has been used. And Ireland is a particularly interesting case because in Ireland, you've had the Advertising Standards Authority basically say, "yes, this may be how your market works, but it's still misleading to consumers. So therefore, we will not accept, you know, we're going to stop Irish energy providers selling green energy that uses this certificates based approach." Now, the thing that's quite interesting with Amazon is that there's a project inside the Green Software Foundation called the Real-Time Cloud Project, which Gabi, I mentioned before. We've actually got someone who's been literally counting up all of the output from every single project to compare this to what the figures might actually be, so that you can get some idea of what the physical production might be versus the amount of credits that might need to be purchased. And this is, we've actually, we can also link to another podcast where we talk about this in terms of additional, deliverable, and timely as ways of talking about green energy.

Where if you're going to actually have, if you're going to make a claim around green energy, you need to be able to basically address these things. We'll link to the podcast episode which dives into this in more detail, but the short version is if something's additional, like you said, it's not reallocating green energy, it's introducing new energy into the grid.

And this is one thing that some of the large providers tend to do now, they make a big story about, "Hey, look at this new wind farm that we've helped create." And that is usually financed through a power purchase agreement for where people do that. So that's kind of the additional part. Now, deliverable is another thing.

So deliverable in this context might be, "I financed a renewable energy project in Norway, but my use is in Spain," right? Which is the other end of Europe. Now, it's not very plausible that the power would go all the way across Europe without any losses to then power your data center in Spain, for example.

So that's deliverable. And then timely is basically saying, "well, I funded a bunch of solar panels, so therefore I'm allowed to say my servers running at night are green." Now again, that is not necessarily the most plausible claim that you would make. So this is why you need a combination of all these three.

And this is one thing that I believe Nina from Energy Tag in the episode we'll link to explains in a lot more detail. Anyway, going back to the original story. Yes, it's really, really good that you see a company like this saying "yes, we're the largest provider," but they're just one of the largest users of energy, full stop.

So just by dint of the size, that they're going to be one of the largest. And when you look at the amount of energy used versus their revenue, I mean, I've shared this, actually, this research, we can see if you assume a figure of 100 Euros per megawatt hour, 100 Dollars per megawatt hour used, which is a pretty generous figure for data centers. It's, what, 0.7 percent of Amazon's revenue, and it's less than a percent for Google's revenue, less than a percent for Microsoft's revenue, so this is actually a good thing, but this is often a more statement of how large these companies are, rather than how much of their money and their revenue they're dedicating to basically green energy.

And that also tells us that we could probably be moving way faster. So that's my, as a executive director of a nonprofit, talking about this, saying we should probably be doing this more, especially when you look at how much money has gone to basically buying your own shares to make your share price go up rather than make sure that we have a functioning society and habitable earth.

Brendan Kamp: So do you foresee any of the new regulations coming in increasing the percentage of revenue that they'll be spending on renewables?

Chris Adams: This is an interesting question because typically when you look at it historically, you've seen that a significant part of the funding for renewable energy has come from various kinds of subsidies to make it easier for companies to get on board. Like, companies will basically say, I'm not going to do this until it makes sense to me on a financial basis. And if you're a hyperscale provider, or if you're just a large user of energy in total, the reason you would have a PPA is, or you would use renewable energy, is yes, it makes you look awesome and looks like you care, and it's good, but it's also the cheapest way to buy power, right? So it's almost willful to choose to buy fossil-based power in lots of places, if you can get a contract like this.

However, there are complications about making sure that the power is both timely, deliverable, and additional, like we've mentioned, but these numbers, the figure of a hundred dollars per megawatt hour, this was something that I ran by some of the energy modelers who we interviewed before, and they said, "this figure is, yeah, that's not an unreasonable figure to use. You could do that."

So if each of these companies doubled their... the amount they're dedicating, they could absolutely all go to 24/7 fossil-free very, very quickly. And there are smaller companies that are already doing this, who are already at 99%. So we'll add some links to that, but I better move on to the next story because this is something that I could talk about literally for hours. All right then, so the next story, this was one I think that you shared actually. Tripling the lifespan of servers. Why we retrofitted 14,000 servers. This is a story from Scaleway, the European cloud provider.

And Brendan, is it okay if I just hand over to you for this, to explain this one? Because you shared this, and I think it's actually quite interesting to see a company talk about this.

Brendan Kamp: Well, this was just something that, you know, pops up on your feed and caught my attention, obviously with talking about embodied carbon, quite a lot recently, the lifespan of servers is very much at the forefront and Gabs, correct me if I'm wrong, what do we estimate in the lifespan of servers? Is it six years?

Gabi Beyer: Think it's four. Maybe by dell. 

Brendan Kamp: Four years, yeah, so like a four year server. And what Scaleway has done is they actually went in to their data center and did some, you know, a bit of analysis on what parts of servers were failing. And it turned out in this case, that majority of them were hardware components, the RAID controllers, and in the RAID controllers, the part that was failing was the battery.

Now, RAID controllers are slightly more old-school components of servers. Nowadays, you have software based RAID. And so what they did was they thought, okay, we can actually remove this components and potentially that could prolong the life of these servers and just switch them over to a software based RAID.

Now, don't ask me what RAID is. I'll probably get it completely wrong, but.

Chris Adams: a Redundant Array of something Drives,

is what it is. 

Brendan Kamp: It's, it's, it's, a hardware thing.

Chris Adams: Yeah.

Brendan Kamp: But just the understanding that they invested all the time and money to go and do, I think they did 24 or 25 POCs, just proving that this could work. Then they went in and took out 14,000 of their servers, moved them to a new data center, updated them with these new controllers, and put them in, and carried on running them. And they had no reduction of quality and service, right? So the servers performed as well, if not better, once they'd done this. The hyperscale is also starting to invest in these ideologies a bit.

I mean, the amount of servers we can save, the amount of embodied emissions we could like reduce by, it would impact server companies quite considerably, but I mean, something has to give at the end of the day. And another thing that they also did mention, which I found fascinating was because we currently have this big chip shortage due to, you know,

Chris Adams: Supply chain.

Yeah.

Brendan Kamp: Supply chain, etc. The servers that were redundant, that they couldn't migrate to this new setup, they stripped for parts, and they're using those parts to maintain the servers that they updated. So they've kind of really tried to look into every single facet of these servers and kind of see how much longer that they can make them last.

And I mean, yeah, from four, as Gabs said, to 10 years now, I mean, that greatly reduces the percentage of the embodied carbon of those servers.

Chris Adams: Yeah, that is, on that kind of scale, that's a meaningful thing to look for.

I guess we should probably be asking for these figures when we purchase cloud services. Ask, "can you tell us about your embodied carbon for your service as well in that case?" Huh.

Brendan Kamp: Yeah. Transparency, right? I mean, this is the key for the cloud providers. I feel at the moment, it's just become more transparent about some of the, this data so that we can do the work to calculate, but just give us the data to do it. Right?

Chris Adams: Gabi, I see you nodding along like this is a thing that you've, you might have some scar tissue developed over the months trying to wrestle with.

Gabi Beyer: Just a little bit of blood, sweat, and tears.

Nothing, nothing I can't handle.

Chris Adams: Okay. So you heard it here first, please share these numbers if you operate some kind of cloud service or you're providing the infrastructure that people run on. Maybe it's worth asking the Leafcloud folks from up there, because they might have some of these numbers.

Alright then. 

Gabi Beyer: That's a good idea. 

Chris Adams: Folks, I've really enjoyed chatting with you and I've realized that we've almost hit the hour that we have allocated and I haven't got around to rounding this up and basically plugging this big event that's coming up.

So on the subject specifically of transparency, the Green Software Foundation runs a kind of annual hack day or hack event basically. Rather than trying to compress building anything into 24 hours of Red Bull, chocolate, and delusion, it's actually spread over a longer period of time. So this is actually a hackathon kind of thing that starts on the 18th of March and runs until the 8th of April.

So that means that as people who might be involved, we do get to sleep and eat and see our families and like, live full lives as people rather than just machines that crank out code. And this year, the focus is around a new initiative called the Impact Framework, which is essentially a bit like a kind of manifest file, or like, you can think of like a Terraform state thing for your entire system that enumerates through all of the figures for like carbon emissions or something like that.

It's designed to be kind of open and flexible. And there's a hackathon all about that at hack.greensoftware.foundation. And there's some specific awards around talking about measuring things beyond carbon, so that might be useful for some of the things we touched on today. Creating the best model so that if someone wants to figure out the emissions of using a service, like say the carbon cloud thing, that might be an example.

The best content for explaining why this matters. There's the best contribution to the framework itself, because it's an open source framework written mostly in TypeScript. And finally, because there's loads of undergraduates who will be alive longer than we will be and have to wrestle with this, the best undergraduate project as well.

So people can register interest there. And I think that's me done with my contractual obligations for this podcast, I suppose. Folks, I really enjoyed chatting with you. This has been loads and loads of fun. Thank you so much for coming on for the day.

Gabi Beyer: It's been really nice. 

Brendan Kamp: It was great. Thank you.

Gabi Beyer: Yeah,

Chris Adams: Before we go, I just want to check if people were interested in the work that you do or wanted to follow up, where would I direct people's attention? Is it like, is there a place, a LinkedIn or a blog that you'd like to talk about? If I ask Brendan once again first, because it's alphabetical, and then I'll ask you, Gabi, if there's anything you would point people to, then I think we'll just wrap up after that, actually.

Brendan Kamp: Yeah, I mean, my LinkedIn's quite active. I'm terrible at Twitter, so it's just brendan-kamp-757 I think is the end. And also we do write quite a lot of blogs, so I've got blog.thegreencoder.io and also blog.re-cinq.com, where you'll find a lot of our blogs and things. And Gabs, code-wise?

Gabi Beyer: Probably LinkedIn as well. Maybe, yeah you can look at our GitHub also on re:cinq and Cloud Carbon and, yeah.

Chris Adams: Go from there. 

All right then. Well, thank you so much for that, you two. As we mentioned, I'll put a markdown version of the transcript and the show links that we have. And if anyone wants to be mentioned with a PR for anything we fix or a typo, then here's your chance for a tiny two seconds of fame in the next episode. All right. Thanks, folks, and have a lovely day. All right. Ta ra! 

Brendan Kamp: Ciao.

Gabi Beyer: Bye.

Chris Adams: 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.

Join TWiGS host Chris Adams in talking to Kristina Devochko, tech lead of the Environmental Sustainability TAG at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Kristina shares her journey from economics to tech sustainability, and eventually joining this Technical Advisory Group. Further, they discuss the mission and projects of the group, as well as how anyone interested and willing is able to contribute. She elaborates on her experience of diving into this new field with no prior knowledge and acts as a reminder that no matter how scary it seems, you can do it too.

Learn more about our people:

• Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | Website
• Kristina Devochko: LinkedIn | Website

Find out more about the GSF:

• The Green Software Foundation Website 
• Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter

News:

• TAG Environmental Sustainability [09:56]
• The Week in Green Software: Carbon Aware Spatial Shifting [15:13]
• Kepler | [16:07]
• GSF Oslo Meetup group [34:08]

Events:

• CNCF Cloud Native Sustainability Week (2023) [14:43]
• Green Software Foundation Oslo - February Meetup [34:31]
• Carbon Hack 24 | Online | 26th Feb to 15th March [39:02] 

Resources:

• Cloud Native Computing Foundation [01:53]
• Kristina’s cat, Penelope [02:51]
• Kristina’s cat, Sofie [02:51]
• TAG ENV | Linktree [09:29]
• Kepler GitHub repository | CNCF 
• Exploring Kepler’s potentials: unveiling cloud application power consumption | CNCF [23:23]
• Environmental Sustainability Glossary [24:33]
• Green Reviews WG task board[24:45]
• Green Reviews WG project repository [26:45]
• [WG Green Reviews] Design Document 
• TAG ENV Slack Channel [31:31]
• GitHub - cncf/tag-env-sustainability: 🌳🌍♻️ TAG Environmental Sustainability [31:44]
• Green Software Champions | Speakers [35:38]

If you enjoyed this episode then please either:

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TRANSCRIPT BELOW:

Kristina Devochko: You know, there weren't many there at that meeting, but they were so passionately discussing the different topics around the topic of sustainability in tech, specifically in the cloud native technologies. And I really loved the passion and interest from those who were there.

Chris Adams: 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, Chris Adams.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Environment Variables, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams. Well, we talk a lot about green software on this podcast. If you've listened to some of these episodes, you'll realize that cloud is a really, really, really big part of green software now.

And last year, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation set up a sustainability focused working group. And given that it's the new year, 2024, it seemed worth checking in on it to see what's new. So today, I'm joined by Kristina Devochko, who's part of the CNCF and some of these groups. Kristina, thank you very much for joining us on the course.

Should I give you a bit of space to introduce yourself and talk about where you're coming from today?

Kristina Devochko: Yes, of course. Hello Chris and hello everyone listening into this episode. Thanks for inviting me. My name is Kristina Devochko. I am a platform engineer at Tietoevry and I'm based in Oslo, Norway, and I am very excited to be here. I am also a Microsoft MVP and a CNCF ambassador. And what comes out of that is that I do a bunch of different activities in the tech community that are mainly related to the topics of cloud computing, green tech, Kubernetes. And one of such activities is my involvement in the CNCF Technical Advisory Group for environmental sustainability, which kind of also correlates with, with a bit of my personal passion for this domain.

And a fun fact about me is that I am what you can call a cat mom at heart. And actually yesterday, right before we joined today with you, Chris, for this podcast, I, me and my husband welcomed two new family members, two adopted kittens that I will run to after we are done with this episode and kind of keep, continue training them to feel safe in their new home.

Chris Adams: Wow, I was not expecting cat pics so early in 2024, but it sounds like we might need to have some reference to this, because you can't talk about cats without sending pictures of cats. So maybe that's something we add to the show notes.

Kristina Devochko: Yeah, that's, by the way, one thing. I love adding the photos, fun photos of my cats into all the technical content I make. So if you would like, we could totally do that.

Chris Adams: All right, if anyone who's not watching for this, I have to say, while I'm using like a basic headphone, Kristina has an awesome set of headphones with glowing cat ears on this. So this may be a running theme for the rest of 2024. All right, so if you're new to this podcast, my name is Chris Adams. I work at the Green Web Foundation, which is a Dutch nonprofit focused on reaching a fossil-free internet by 2030.

I also work in the policy working group inside the Green Software Foundation, where we do work on policies and respond to future coming legislation and things like that. But for the purposes of this show, what I can share with you is that while we talk about this, and we're going to mention various projects, we do our best to share a transcript and set of show notes for all of these things.

And because it's New Year, we're going to be trying something new. We're going to be posting a transcript of this plus all the links onto GitHub. So if there's something that you're curious or you want to learn more about or we've got something wrong, we'll be accepting pull requests for the transcript if there's anything that you really were curious about.

And yeah, we'll be sharing that on podcast.greensoftware.Foundation as per usual. And I think with that, should we begin then, actually, Kristina?

Kristina Devochko: Yeah, let's do it.

Chris Adams: All right. Okay. So, Kristina, you mentioned before that you're calling from Oslo, and I no longer live in England, but I grew up in England, so old habits die hard, and we always talk about the weather.

And I'm calling you from Berlin today, which is coated with snow. So I should actually ask, how is the weather in Oslo today? 

Wow. 

Kristina Devochko: Oh, that's a very relevant question because it's quite freezing, actually. And like, personally, I love winter and I love snow. And we were lucky enough this year to have a truly white winter and Christmas and the New Year's Eve. But I need to say that this year we had like a few extreme cold waves happening in Norway.

And I was recently reading an article, I live just outside of Oslo and like, right after the New Year's, in the beginning of January, there was a new record that was hit in the Oslo municipality, where it was registered to be minus 31.1 degrees Celsius, and that's like, the previous record was from 2011, and it was 28.8 degrees, I think. And today I had an appointment at 9am before this podcast recording. And when I went outside, I saw that the temperature was minus 20 degrees. So that's kind of when you feel that your nose is full of needles at that point. So I love winter, but not when it's that freezing. But I'm here now in a warm room and happy to be joining you for this podcast. So...

Chris Adams: Well, I'm glad. I'm glad we're both in somewhat warmer temperatures than minus 31 degrees Celsius. All right. Okay. Fun fact for this, if people follow along, there is, if you have any kind of carbon aware websites today, the coldness is actually changing some of the carbon intensity for some websites. So there's a website called Branch that me and some friends maintain.

It actually broke the code because it was so cold and so not windy in the UK for a certain time that the carbon intensity went higher than we've ever seen it. So this is an example of how some of this can manifest in software itself. All right, so we'll get to that a little bit later on, but I should basically, before we dive into this, it's worth asking, you now work in green cloud computing and that's like your new specialization.

But that hasn't always been the case. So if I understood it, you did, you worked as, you trained as an economist first before you came to working with cloud and development, and then you changed directions into this field. Is that the case? 

Kristina Devochko: Yeah, yeah, that's true. I mean, I never, I never thought of working in tech as being my kind of career. I wasn't born and raised with like all this programming knowledge from the start. So I came from a culture where it was natural for women to do something else than computer science. So for me, in my head, it was natural to do something like economics.

And that's what I started with. I got accepted to the bachelor's program at the university. And then I figured out that it was so boring. The first year I started, it just didn't work out. I couldn't find the motivation. And I had a friend who was studying computer science, but more into the NLP domain, into natural language processing.

And she kind of challenged me because kind of the atmosphere there was good and people were nice. And it was interesting. So I just took a chance and applied and got in. And from that point on, there was kind of no way back. So I started working with as a full stack developer and got really that spark after studies.

And for two years ago, I think there was someone from the community who challenged me, like, why don't you start contributing to the tech community as well? There is so much you can do there if you really love working with tech also outside your full time job. So I actually started doing that, and from that point on, it's like, I've tried a lot of different things, and I find it being a lot of fun, so it's for me like more, it has become more than a full time job, a source of income, it has become a hobby, and a sort of passion, and like if, since we are talking more about the sustainability in this podcast, personally, I've been really focused on that area, like in my life, in my everyday life, living a more eco-friendly, planet-friendly lifestyle. And from that, it kind of naturally transitioned into also putting focus on that at work, in my company. And from there, I ended up joining the Environmental Sustainability Technical Advisory Group. So it was like a very interesting journey starting, now that I look back at it, starting with economics and thinking that this is my only way to kind of take my career and then like ending up in a totally different space.

That's, yeah, that is somewhat, somehow that was a bit of magic for me.

Chris Adams: Okay, cool. Thank you for that. So there's from an academic transition to I guess an energy transition really. And as I understand it, so in the last year you got involved because you mentioned the Cloud Native Computing Foundation Technical Advisory Group for Environmental Sustainability. That's quite a mouthful.

I mean, I have to ask, is there a short name for it or is there something I should use instead when I'm using that? Because I don't think it rolls quite off the tongue and I'm sure there's a faster way I can refer to that, right?

Kristina Devochko: Oh, yeah, totally. I know. That's like, that's a bit of a wording there because you need to kind of also showcase where this technical advisory group come from. So, like, we call it the TAG ENV, like TAG ENV. So TAG for technical advisory group and ENV is That's kind of our abbreviation for environmental sustainability.

So we just call it TAG ENV or CNCF TAG ENV. So that's what we also use in our writing, writing content. 

Chris Adams: TAG ENV is easy. TAG ENV I'm going to use from now on if I'm going to refer to this, because that's much, much faster, and it's kind of fun to say. All right, okay. So I should have to ask then. There is now a TAG that's focused on ENV, right? And maybe you could tell me a little bit about actually what it does, and what kind of work or what kind of projects might be associated with that, for example.

Or maybe even how you got involved in it, actually.

Kristina Devochko: Yeah, of course. So, CNCF has, and CNCF, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, so I'll call it CNCF. It has a specific structure as an organization, so it has different groups in order to ensure that the different projects and users and organizations that are supporting the foundation can kind of develop and improve in a sustainable, expandable manner. So the, therefore there is a concept called Technical Advisory Groups. And this is basically a group that is led by people that are community members that are specialized in that specific domain that the group covers. And then anyone from the community can join those groups depending on their area of interest and participate in the meetings, participate by contributing to the different projects and activities that are going on in those, in those TAGs, which is the short version of the name. And there are many different areas. There is security, observability, there may be networking and like for, I think now it's two years ago, like one and a half years ago, the Environmental Sustainability TAG was founded by some of the community members. And at first we didn't hear about it. Like I personally haven't heard about it until spring last year, because I was starting to prepare more content on the topics of green tech. And I got in as a speaker at the KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe conference, which was in Amsterdam in April last year. And I start, and I was doing my research, preparing for the talk, and I, by chance, found this TAG, this group, and I was like, wow, okay, CNCF has a dedicated group now, but it, it didn't seem very active because it was just starting out. And then I, of course, highlighted it also during my talk and also saw on the schedule during the conference that they had the pro, a group meeting. So I just joined that, actually knowing nothing about the community in that group. And that was really for me as a beginner, a bit scary, but at the same time, when I joined, I was very warmly welcomed and I loved the engagement, you know? There weren't many there at that meeting, but they were so passionately discussing the different topics around the topic of sustainability in tech, specifically in the cloud native technologies. And I really loved the passion and interest from those who were there that I thought, "wow, cool. This seems like people really care about it, not just do it for, you know, to check, have a checkmark somewhere." Yeah, And I started just after that, I came back home and I started joining the regular meetings and just contributing with small steps, just doing some minor changes, asking questions.

And now it's less than a year actually. And now right before Christmas, I got appointed to be a tech lead for the technical advisory group. And I'm really happy about that because I've been putting a lot of love into supporting the TAG and we have grown and it's really great to see more and more people joining us and also joining on the activities that we are doing. And kind of the main mission of this group is to raise focus and raise awareness about the importance of sustainability in the cloud native landscape.

Like what is the current state of that?

What kind of challenges we have and how can we help both the CNCF landscape, the projects there, but also the companies that are utilizing those projects that are running in cloud, be it public cloud or private cloud, are running in a cloud native manner, how can we help them get the sustainability of their systems and software better, basically? 

Chris Adams: Okay. I'm somewhat aware of the TAG ENV'S work. I remember that, I think, last week, there was this, last, towards the end of last year, there was a sustainability week with a bunch of online talks by various people presenting, yeah, and we'll share a link to that, and I know there's a couple of other projects that we're going to talk about in a bit more detail, and you've mentioned this idea of, well, what is a state of the art, how do you make some of this visible to people, and you name checked some things like observability.

Are there any kind of particular projects that you're particularly excited about, or you might be seeing kind of repurposed, because you, I believe you mentioned one project, and I think in July we had Niki and, Niki and Ross, who were also part of the TAG at the time, talking about some of the work in making carbon emissions more, more, more observable and visible to people.

Maybe you could talk a little bit about that, because I think that's one thing that you've mentioned to me that you're quite excited about.

Kristina Devochko: Yeah, absolutely. And Niki and Ross, it's great that they have been on the podcast because I know that they have been talking also about Kepler, which I also wanted to highlight in this episode as well. And they are also driving now the kind of subgroup in our Environmental Sustainability TAG that also has a separate project, which I also would like to talk a bit more about afterwards.

But like the first CNCF project that I would like to highlight that kind of touches upon the observability piece in context of measuring, like, the sustainability of your, of your system. And that is Kepler. And this, this project has now, for a few months ago, I think, entered the CNCF landscape as a sandbox project, so that's kind of a big deal for the whole project and everyone who was supporting it. And for those of you who are listening in and haven't heard about Kepler, it's the short name for Kubernetes-based Efficient Power Level Exporter.

So that. sounds like a very complex name, but that actually makes meaning. So that's a word with the meaning behind it. So this project, its main goal is to measure energy consumption so that this data can be gathered, collected, and afterwards you could feed it to the machine learning models that can perform a specific analysis on that power usage utilization data. And then you could visualize that. And by visualizing that over time, you could also understand how efficiently your resources, your power is being used and what kind of optimizations you can make based on that. So you could kind of...

This could help you make more informed choices on, in terms of optimizing your resource usage.

Chris Adams: So there's a couple of things I just want, so I just want to check if I, check my understanding and also for other listeners on this. So there's a tool called Kepler, and because measuring power usage inside the cloud can be quite challenging at times, this is essentially an open source tool that goes some of the way to looking to making that more accessible and observable to people who are responsible for, like, operating clusters of computers and things like that.

And, if I understand it correctly, it's using what was the kind of hip and trendy software, like, Extended Berkeley's Packet Filters. It's using something quite close to the metal, so it doesn't actually slow down the system to report information as much as other things. Or, at least, that's one of the considerations that people have been taking some steps for.

Is that correct?

Kristina Devochko: Yeah, you're correct. And I think an important piece to mention here, like coming on to your point that it's not that easy, necessarily, to gather this type of metrics for power consumption. Like if you think about bare metal, that type of data can be more, in a more easier manner gathered because it is available directly from the hardware when you're running on bare metal, but when it comes to cloud providers, or like when you're running on virtual machines, this, there is no support in virtual machines to be able to make these types of metrics available.

So there, that's why it may be challenging for example to get 100 percent accuracy of running Kepler on, on managed Kubernetes service. And to just make a notion of that, Kepler is mainly targeting the Kubernetes-specific workload. So when you're running Kubernetes clusters, be it on bare metal or be it in, as a managed Kubernetes service, for example, in public cloud. And like you mentioned, it also uses BPF to gather some of that specific metrics specifically that would be specifically useful in, in public cloud. But we would link a blog post as well that I would recommend to check out because it goes in more very technical details around the different deployment models and architecture for Kepler because they have, they are currently working on a specific deployment model that I really hope we will get to see public cloud providers collaborating with Kepler project on, which would potentially allow to not use a pre-trained model with some kind of pre, pre tested, yeah.

Pre, there is like a data set that was based on some of the other data that the Kepler community has collected, for example, from running on bare metal.

And it does make some assumptions based from that. So it provides some pre-trained power models that you could use in public cloud to get somewhat close to reality type of data, but still, for example, things like idle power, you will not get that information or that metrics from Kepler because there is no way for the tool knowing about how many VMs are running on the host when it comes to public cloud.

Chris Adams: Oh, I see. 

Kristina Devochko: There, that's kind of the, there are some limitations there and this blog post goes very nicely into those details. But the deployment mode that they're working on, that would allow you to install Kepler on the host first, that public cloud providers could do. They would install Kepler on the host first, that would gather that hardware specific metrics for power consumption.

And then you would kind of have a layer. 

Chris Adams: The visibility at that point, rather than like, you're inside the virtual machine guessing how many other neighbors are also using your physical machine, you're actually getting the physical machine saying, "yeah, you actually have 10 neighbors and six of them are mining Bitcoin."

Or they wouldn't be doing that. But like, you get the general idea. I'm not sure if you're allowed to do that in some, in a lot of clouds. Okay. I'm glad you mentioned that. 

Kristina Devochko: Hmm. Yeah. So that would require some collaboration with public cloud providers since they have control of the hardware. But then in that case, you would kind of install Kepler twice. You would install it on the host and you would install it in the Kubernetes cluster. But then by doing that, cloud providers, maybe by making Kepler data from their hosts available as an add-on on, yeah. 

Chris Adams: Service you could then subscribe to. 

Kristina Devochko: So you could get that data. Yeah.

So you could get that data and you could get an even more, more accuracy on that power consumption metric. So I really hope that the adoption of the project takes off and we get to see it available in the managed Kubernetes services in public cloud, for example. So i, it's, it looks really promising, to say least. 

Chris Adams: I'm glad you mention that, because there's one project inside the GSF, this is the Green Software Foundation for other people, called the Realtime Cloud Project, which is currently led by, amongst others, Adrian Cockcroft, formerly VP of AWS, and there's people from Microsoft and also Amazon who are working to essentially do the carbon part if, if things like Kepler are actually exposing some of this.

And for the nerds who are on this, listening on this podcast, I'm going to ask for your help. Because one of the reasons that's cited for not sharing this information is there's a very particular kind of attack that you can use if you have direct energy emissions being exposed at a very high resolution.

You can find out what programs are running or even some information like that. So there are reasons cited for not sharing this information. There's a whole line between zero knowledge and letting everyone get hacked and like the, the research that we've seen or that's been shared inside there is that around the minute resolution, that's still enough for operators like yourself to kind of like tune and manage carbon, but also is something that still mitigates against most of these attacks.

And I do forget the name of the animal that the attack is named after, but if you're listening to this and you submit a PR, I'll be very grateful for this because it's got a cool name. It really does. But I'm totally blanking on this. If you're curious about this as well, we did actually do a podcast in July last year with both Ross Fairbanks of Flat Peak and Niki...

I can never pronounce her surname. Niki, I'm so sorry. Niki, she works at Grafana and, Manoladeki, I believe. So that's the people. And we'll share a link to that podcast, which dives into a bit more detail about some of that. Okay, so we spoke about that. And that's one of the wider projects that has some application clearly inside this.

But there's maybe some projects, there's a, well, there's one or two projects inside the TAG ENV that you're also involved in, that you said that you'd like to kind of talk a little about. Maybe if we give you a bit of space to mention one of those, perhaps.

Kristina Devochko: Yeah, of course. So like Kepler and other projects that are coming out that are related to sustainability, we support them as a technical advisory group. But we also are looking for ways we can also contribute by starting some of the projects inside the TAG. And we have a few like content focus projects, like the landscape document that Kind of covers the state of sustainability in the cloud native space that we are working right now on creating a version two for. And we have recently published the glossary for cloud native sustainability glossary that could help clarify some of those specific terms. But when it comes to more technical contributions, I wanted to highlight the project that we are working on in the subgroup of the TAG that is called Green Reviews, so it's a working group that is run by Nicky, Antonio, Antonio DeRosso, which is one of our TAG contributors and now is his co chair in the group, and Ross Fairbanks as well, that is the technical lead for that group. And what we are working on in that group is that we are building a workflow that can be used to target the projects in the CNCF landscape, like Kepler for like, not like Kepler, but the other projects that you would be using, for example, Kubernetes, Kubernetes, I think would be a better suggestion in this case, because the workflow actually uses Kepler together, some of the, of those metrics.

So this workflow would then be connected towards those CNCF projects that will be running under load and so that we could simulate a load on kind of the application itself so that we could gather the sustainability specific power and resource utilization specific metrics over time so that we and that workflow could analyze the data and publish information about the sustainability posture of that project.

And this statistics can then be publicly available for all the projects in the CNCF landscape so that over time, the project maintainers and project contributors could look into the states of their projects from the sustainability side and improve the resource utilization of those projects over time, make them more resource efficient, which also is one of the goals for Kepler projects, for example. 

Find those bottlenecks that, find those ways to improve and make those projects more lightweight and more resource efficient. So this is also something that is open for anyone to contribute. So if you like to code, you could just join and pick an issue and, you know, start helping out.

So if you would like Chris, you're also welcome to join. 

Chris Adams: Maybe some, there may be some things we look into a little bit later on. So, if I understand that correctly, there's a couple of things you mentioned, and you use this term sustainability posture of a project. I'm taking that to mean like, what the kind of profile might be like, where, under what, so how it might perform under certain circumstances and what in certain places it's, is it more efficient here or less efficient there, is that what you mean when you say that?

So, the idea, you get an idea of where there might be common areas for improvement across the whole portfolio of projects, for example, based on some of the real world data. Is that the thinking behind it?

Kristina Devochko: Yeah, we are like still in very early phases. So this working group has been like a few months old. So the piece, for example, of what kind of methodologies we would use to calculate that, that kind of sustainability posture, how efficient a project is, we have still not 100 percent defined that. So I think we want to start like simple by just gathering some of the Metrics like the SRE specific metrics, you know, like CPU, memory usage, maybe use, use the Kepler specific power consumption metrics.

Start there. And then the next step would be to see what other metrics we would need, or those metrics that we have collected by now, should we use as, the Software Carbon Intensity Specification, should we use that in combination with something else? Should we use something like Impact Framework Engine, right?

From GSF. So we have been looking into that. There are some discussions around if we should use, for example, SCI as a Software Carbon Intensity methodology. 

Chris Adams: That's one way of measuring the basic, it's a bit like, a little bit like PUE for data centers. It's like the amount of emissions associated, a kind of rate, as a software. Okay.

Kristina Devochko: So that we could provide some of that information, like you say, that we could provide, like how much power has been used, if we could correlate that to the amount of carbon emissions, maybe water consumption at some point, because this is also becoming very important these days with enhancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning.

So we're still figuring that out. So I don't have an exact answer for how exactly it will look like, but this is an opportunity for anyone also from... Yeah. 

Chris Adams: Refer to some of the existing state of the art. Okay, that's cool. For folks who were interested in listening along to this, so, Kristina, what you've actually described might make you think of an episode that we did with Arne from Green Coding Berlin. We've interviewed him as well.

He spoke about some of this in a bit more detail. We should share a link to that because he dives into very deep amounts of data for this and also his organization has been sharing some really interesting stuff about the difficulties of tracking some of this stuff on the cloud. Because, you know, one of the, while the cloud can be extremely convenient, there are knock-on effects on basically having an amorphous blob of compute that you kind of tap into, rather than having a direct machine that you can direct measure directly.

All right, great, and I'm really glad you mentioned the glossary and some of the other things you had, because one thing that I found really helpful when helping other people actually to talk about something for the first time is having this stuff saying, "well, this means this," or even just having the landscape with you seeing that, well, "wow, there's actually a really wide range of projects where the sustainability aspects do touch on a bunch of these things."

So, thank you for mentioning those, actually. I should probably ask you now on relating to that. We spoke about, like, TAG ENV. And we spoke about some of the projects that are ongoing, but it might be useful to talk a little bit about how you folks organize and how people can get involved, because I was able to join the Slack and chat to a few people to kind of more get a kind of feel for it, but I figure it might be useful for other people to realize that it is actually quite easy, and this is something that you've invested a bit of time in to make accessible to people, and well, you're here, so I should, I guess I should ask you really.

Kristina Devochko: Yeah, I appreciate you asking that because we are always looking for ways to communicate to the other community members that it is not that scary and difficult as it may seem to start contributing to some of these groups and organizations. So in the TAG, it's pretty, I think it's quite simply structured.

So of course we have some of the chairs of the TAG, and we have also tech leads that kind of overview the different types of activities in the TAG and in subgroups are done in accordance with our mission and our goals and contribute in that area. But it is open for anyone to join. So we don't have necessarily like a membership or anything. So everyone can just join our slack our regular meetings we have both meetings for the TAG in itself, which are bi-weekly, and the working groups-specific meetings as well. And anyone can just join and start asking questions, participating in discussions, you can go to our GitHub repository and in the issues filter on 'help wanted' or 'good first issue' labels.

And then you could see if there is something that resonates with you, or you could just start by contributing to the existing discussions in those issues. You could contribute content. So if there is a specific topic that you would like to write a blog post on when it comes to cloud native sustainability, you could just submit that, and then we will help you to get it there, to get it on our website, to get it on the CNCF blog. So there are quite a few ways you could just start. And even if, yeah, and even if you feel like, it feels a bit scary, you are very much welcome to reach out to me. We could probably share some contact info, or just go on the Slack and send me a message if you need some guidance on how to join us.

And we have a separate blog post that we recently wrote.

Step by step guide. 

Chris Adams: Like how to take your... okay, well you heard it here first, you have a direct offer from one of the members to help you in if you're curious about doing this. This is one thing I actually quite admire about the CNCF. With the Green Software Foundation we, while it's a membership organization, it can feel a little bit difficult to get in, and this is one thing that I've been really impressed by.

And I'm aware that yes, there are all these weekly calls and there's things where it's very easy to see what's going on if you're remote, for example. But as I understand it, you do a fair few things in Oslo as well for like people who like to meet up and physically share the same physical space as other people sometimes, like doing meetups as well.

Maybe you might want to just briefly touch on that before, because I know this is one of the first things we have coming up in 2024 that you mentioned actually. 

Kristina Devochko: Yeah, that's true. And like, like you mentioned with the Green Software Foundation, I, when I first started learning more about it, I was like, "Oh yeah, I would like to become a member." And then I realized that my company was not part of that yet. So it was not, not that easy, but still, you, you of course have some opportunities to just follow and participate in discussions.

But what I also liked when I saw that GSF started with local meetups, local meetup groups and supporting that initiative. And then when I checked, there was no one, no such meetup group in Norway. So it was open for anyone to just start one under the GSF umbrella. So in September last year, I just asked if I can do that.

And then we started a group, Green Software Foundation Oslo Meetup Group, basically, which will, I hope can become an arena for the, to grow and strengthen the local community of technologists who are passionate about the topics of green software and green coding in general. And we had one meetup last year to launch the group in October and hopefully can have it on quarterly basis.

So now the next meetup coming up is in, in February, and we'll have some nice topics about the impact of AI and machine learning on sustainability and also the adoption of Cloud Carbon Footprint, open source tool in one of the Norwegian companies called ODA, and I believe one of the recent episodes was precisely on that topic, wasn't it? 

Chris Adams: No one admits to using it, but it's basically underpinning so much of all this stuff. Yeah. That's really, I'm glad, I didn't actually know that Oda was actually doing that kind of work. And it's quite nice to hear that, yeah, it shows up in various places, because I, I really enjoyed chatting to, chatting to the guys last, for the last episode, and nerding out about like Legend of Zelda, if nothing else.

That was of

the

call 

Kristina Devochko: yeah. 

Chris Adams: was some of it. Okay, so we've shared a link to the Oslo meetup group, so people can find out about that and when that's taking place. I believe that's open to anyone who's physically in Oslo. You don't need to be a member of anything like that, you just need to be interested along those lines.

I should probably, at this point here, just give people a heads up that if you're not in Oslo, and you're not on remote event, and you're maybe organizing events, it's worth knowing that there is actually a directory of potential speakers at speakers.greensoftware.foundation. This is one place where, if you're running an event, and you're looking for someone who can contribute some expertise, or is able to kind of help with it then, that's one resource.

And also, I believe that you've shared a link here, which is run from the CNCF, which basically has a listing of other events coming up as well. Is that the case?

Kristina Devochko: Yeah. On the website for the TAG ENV, we have a separate events section and currently we are working on adding, implementing some automation because we have the tool that was donated by some of the community members so that we could use to scrape the data about different sustainability related conferences, sessions, meetups, and then we could continuously update that events page.

So hopefully there will be coming out there automatically in not too long. So you could check that one out as well.

Chris Adams: That sounds cool. I can't believe in 2024 we still don't have a kind of, like, solved problem. Like, we haven't solved the problem of events yet, like finding out when they're coming up. Because this is something I really struggle with, and I'm glad that you have that mentioned. And I think you just said something kind of cryptic but interesting there. So there was a Cloud Native Sustainability Week in October, and I will happily admit on air that I basically plundered that place for all these videos and people to speak to for future shows.

And we've got one or two of the speakers who've been presenting there talking about some really deep dives. We've got, we've got some of those episodes lined up. You're planning one for 2024 as well. Is that likely to be around the same time, like October-ish?

Kristina Devochko: Yeah, I hope so. I, we will need to see if this is the date we should go for. We haven't decided on the date yet, but we have seen that it has been a success. It was the first time in 2023 that we decided to do it. So we were not sure how it would work out, but actually, despite the virtual mini conference that we had like a two hour event with some speakers presenting virtually, we also had like, I think we were around 20 plus local meetups that were, we calculated that it was happening in 17 countries across four continents.

So we think that it has been quite a success. So we hope we could do it on an annual basis. And now we have just started planning for the Cloud Native Sustainability Week in 2024. So if you or any of the listeners would like to contribute, it's totally open. And we have a tracking issue in the repository for that as well.

Yeah.

Chris Adams: you for that, Kristina. We'll share a link to the last one because there was really, I actually filed an issue in the TAG because I was like, "hi, I missed all the talks because I was in the wrong time zone." Or moreover, I might have been asleep at the time or something like that. But and then I think within two or three days, I had someone basically show like here's a list on YouTube of every single talk with links back to the slides and everything like that. It was so, so nice to see that. And there was some fantastic content. I was really impressed by that. So yeah. 

Kristina Devochko: Yeah, it was really good, I agree. 

Chris Adams: Oh, we're talking about events and I almost forgot. I should mention that there is, there's a quick announcement I kind of have to share as part of like me working in the GSF.

There is an event coming up later in this year called Carbon Hack 24. This is the Green Software Foundation's kind of global event, basically. Essentially, the idea is that it's a little bit like what Carbon Hack was like last year. So it's a week's long kind of hackathon kind of thing. This time, the focus is around a piece of software I believe you mentioned called the Impact Framework.

This is an idea which is a bit like something like a kind of manifest file or an executable manifest file for us, for people to kind of understand and measure the impacts of software. The idea would be that there's this piece of work that the GSF has been working on called Impact Framework, and the idea is a bit of a hackathon around something like that.

And at the, right now, there, we often talk about sustainability in terms of carbon only, but Kristina, you mentioned water as one, one possible dimension. And there's a number of other dimensions that we've actually spoken about as well, which are also fair game for exposing or looking into and things like that.

So that's one thing coming up. And I should say, it's online. It starts on the 18th of March and ends on the 8th of April. You don't need to stay awake for that entire time, surviving on Red Bull and chocolate. That's not a good idea. But the idea is that there's space to make it kind of accessible to people regardless of where you are in the world.

And if you go to 0hack.greensoftware.foundation, then people can see and learn all about that. And the only thing to bear in mind is that the registration is the 22nd of January. So there's a, it will need to move relatively quickly on that. Okay, there's a, there are a series of awards for that, that we'll be referring to.

And yep, I think that's the plug that I've done while we were talking about events. So thank you for bearing with me for that, Kristina. 

Kristina... 

Kristina Devochko: Of course, I'm very excited for that. I'm very excited for the hackathon and it's cool to see that it's not just a one day, one day, 24 hours type of activity.

Chris Adams: Here's my free idea that I'm unable, that I would like to work on, but I don't want to promise myself that I'll do it, because that's, I'm getting older, I'm not sure how much time I have, but I know there's a thing called Node-RED, I want there to be Node Green, to use some of the ideas behind Node-RED to create a visual representation of all of the inputs of data that you might have in, so you can work out some of this, because when we talk about this kind of stuff, it can be a bit hard to understand where information about carbon intensity might be coming from or where, like you've described utilization or how hard a machine is working is coming from.

And I think if there's a visual way to present that, that would be useful. And if there's absolute precedent of things like Node-RED being used in all these different places. So that's like kind of my lukewarm take, I suppose. Alright, Kristina. Thank you so much for spending the time to talk with us.

I really enjoy, appreciate you coming on and talking all about the TAG ENV and how people can get involved. And yeah, this has been really fun. Thank you for giving us your time and talking about this. This has been good.

Kristina Devochko: Thank you, Chris. It's been a great discussion. It's, it's been fun. So thank you for inviting me. It's been a pleasure. So I hope some of you would be listening in to this episode, would be interested in joining us and don't hesitate to reach out if you're not sure about anything. 

Chris Adams: That's a really good point. Just before we close off, we should, if people are interested in the work that you're doing, either personally or the actual TAG ENV ,what's the best, what should people be typing into their search bars, for example, just to learn about your work or learn about the CNCF's environmental work?

Kristina Devochko: Yeah, I think that if you would like to get in touch with me, you could probably just type my name, Kristina Devochko, and on LinkedIn, normally I use most, mostly LinkedIn, and then I have a separate technical blog where I write some technical content on those different topics, kristhecodingunicorn.com.

And if you would like to join the Environmental Sustainability TAG, you could just, I hope we will add the links to the website and to the repo, but we are also at the CNCF Slack. So if you join that, you could search for a channel called TAG-environmental-sustainability, and we'll warmly welcome you there.

Chris Adams: Brilliant. Thank you so much. I'm also really glad you mentioned Kris, the Coding Unicorn, because although this is an audio podcast, you need to Imagine that behind Kris there is a neon sign saying, Kris, the coding unicorn. And that's, it's... That's all I've been able to see or look at when on this conversation, so I'm really glad you mentioned that.

Kristina Devochko: Almost like product placement.

Chris Adams: Yeah. Okay. Well Kristina, thank you very much for this and hopefully you stay warm and cozy for the rest of the day. Take care of yourself.

Kristina Devochko: Thank you, Chris. Thanks everyone.

Chris Adams: Okay, bye.

Kristina Devochko: Bye.

Chris Skipper: Hey everybody, this is Chris, the producer of Environment Variables, just butting in to tell you about an additional resource that we have for the upcoming Hackathon 2024. Join us every Monday at 2:30pm GMT for our regular live stream, which explains how the IMPACT framework works and shares hack project ideas.

You can visit hack.greensoftware.foundation to find out more about that and sign up for both the live stream and the Hackathon. That's all for now, see you next time.

Chris Adams: 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.

Asim Hussain is joined by guests Srini Rakhunathan and Navveen Balani, the technical leads on the Impact Framework. They delve into how this innovative tool effectively models, measures, simulates, and monitors the environmental impacts of software across various platforms. The conversation explores the framework's unique ability to handle diverse environments, from cloud systems to mobile devices, with an emphasis on the practicality and necessity of measuring software emissions accurately. Highlights include intriguing insights into integrating the Impact Framework with SCI Open Data and the future of green software development. This episode is packed with valuable information and thought-provoking discussions that offer a glimpse into the future of sustainable software.


Learn more about our people:

• Asim Hussain: LinkedIn / Twitter
• Navveen Balani: LinkedIn
• Srini Rakhunathan: LinkedIn 

Topics:

• The Impact Framework  | GSF [3:00]

Find out more about the GSF:

• The Green Software Foundation Website 
• Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter

Events:

• Carbon Hack 24 | Online | 26th Feb to 15th March [40:08]

Resources:

• The Software Carbon Intensity Specification | GSF [3:44]
• CarbonQL | CarbonQL [09:19]
• Joseph Cook | Project Lead on IF [13:43]
• Kubernetes [16:45]
• Node.js [17:13]
• Cloud Carbon Footprint | Thoughtworks [21:18]
• Boavizta [21:32]
• Azure Functions [23:29]
• Cloud Instance Metadata Model [25:22]
• Teads Curve | Benjamin Davy of Teads [26:12]

If you enjoyed this episode then please either:

• Follow, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts
• Follow and rate on Spotify
• Watch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!
• Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!

TRANSCRIPT BELOW:
That simplification that you can just download the code. You need to know a little bit of Node.js or Yarn or how to use it to just be able to run it. As long as you are able to do that, you're pretty much up and ready. Maybe we can even set up a timer, Asim, how long it takes for someone to run it. I bet it will not be more than five minutes.

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 back to Environment Variables, the podcast that covers just about everything to do with sustainable software development. I'm your host, Asim Hussain. I'm the executive director of the Green Software Foundation here to navigate you through the evolving landscape of green software. In today's episode, we've got a special segment lined up to you, joining us are Srini Rakhunathan and Navveen Balani, the brilliant minds leading the project on a much anticipated Impact Framework from the Green Software Foundation. They're here to give us an insider's view of this revolutionary tool designed to model, measure, and simulate and monitor the environmental impacts of software. From cloud environments to your mobile devices, the Impact Framework is set to redefine how we understand and reduce the carbon footprint of our digital world. Before we dive in, let me introduce my esteemed guests and colleagues for this episode of Environment Variables. Navveen, how about, let's start off with you, please.

Navveen Balani: Yeah, thank you, Asim. Hello, everyone. I'm Navveen Balani. I'm Managing Director and Chief Technologist with Technology Sustainability Innovation Group at Accenture working on the intersection of technology and sustainability, and an active member of Green Software Foundation from its inception. Happy to be here and be part of this podcast.

Asim Hussain: Thank you, Navveen. And we also have Srini. Srini, do you want to give an introduction to yourself?

Srinivasan Rakhunathan: Definitely. Thanks, Asim. And wonderful to see you again, Navveen. I'm Srini. I'm part of Microsoft's cloud sustainability team, and I am a senior program manager. I work on sustainable hardware, and as part of Green Software Foundation, I got an opportunity to work on sustainable software with this amazing team.

So glad to be part of this call and happy to help.

Asim Hussain: Before we dive in, just a reminder that everything we talk about will be linked in the show notes below the episode. So I've got a couple of questions that maybe we can go through, but I actually thought, we were having a chat before that, I actually thought it might be interesting for everybody to understand the journey of Impact Framework, because that might actually help people understand what it even is.

I struggle to even explain. I think that's one of the, one of the things I want to chat to you all about is like, how do you even talk about Impact Framework to others? Because I, it can be so many different things to so many different people. It's a little bit challenging. But, yeah. I thought it might be interesting to talk about, you know, the early days, like years and years ago. And I remember, this is how I remember it. So I remember it as: we were all working on the Software Carbon Intensity Specification together, getting really deep and diving into a lot of that stuff, and then we knew we needed to start actually using the SCI and writing case studies. Srini, I believe you were the first person in the entire world to have written a case study on the SCI.

You did it with the MST, FTE shop on sample one. And that was a wonderful moment. I remember that. And then a little bit later, Navveen, you wrote like a very detailed one with kind of a larger case study with, I think, an Accenture use case. Yeah. I don't know. Let's just start off there. Like, what did you guys like, do you remember much about that time?

Like, what were you thinking? Like, what was, what were the challenges I'd say that you had when you were implementing and trying to write some of those case studies, do you remember? You were the first people in the world, almost, who would like actually bother to measure software.

Srinivasan Rakhunathan: You know, it almost seems like, you know, you were on a journey for which you didn't know where to start or where to end. And that's how I used to think when I did that case study, because there was no reference material. There was no guidance. There was no, you know, right or wrong, right? We had multiple discussions with this forum and the extended forum pouring over the calculations again, again, and again, to even figure out whether we are doing the right thing or the wrong thing. So yeah, very, um, anecdotal, Asim, that you're talking about how we started off. I remember there was this SCI data project, SCI guide project. We knew that we were looking for something, but in parallel, we were building these case studies, it's almost seems magical today that we are at this place today. 

Asim Hussain: That's true. I remember one moment, you just, we were getting really deep into trying to figure out the carbon emissions of networking. That was one of the things I remember that we're getting really deep into trying to figure that out. And we were, you were looking at energy expenditure of bits across a network and trying to estimate the carbon intensity and of the embodied carbon that was being used when you're transmitting data.

And I think eventually we just landed on using a coefficient of like gigabytes per, you know, carbon per gigabyte that we got from some source. I remember like that, there was all of trying to figure all of that out. Yeah, we'd had, you're right, there was all those, like, hard won lessons that we've kind of also forgotten about these days as well. Navveen, what do you remember about when you were writing your case study? What was the hardest challenge that you had when you wrote your case study?

Navveen Balani: So I think going back, I think the fundamental challenge that we faced was around data and particularly around whether the data is authentic enough, right, for measurement. Now that's a, that is a problem to solve at that point of time. So, what we did was, why not go with approximations, coefficients, so at least unblock us from a data perspective. And once we have the data sorted out, I think next was around energy calculations, measurements. And since we are all deploying on cloud, right, most of the applications are running on cloud. At that point of time, uh, a lot of these data was transparent to us, right? So whether it's watching machine, choice of processors. So how do you even get to the power emissions and then calculate energy? So I think it's a journey. We went through the data challenges. We went through the vendor challenges. We then we a lot of reference material, which we use. And I would say finally we then had projects like the SCI guide that we wrote, which provided instructions on how can you go about doing a calculation.

We started off with the ontology project where we thought, okay, we'll give them a model representation of your software boundary, then maybe do a one click and then calculate the SCI score. So a lot of these thinking projects finally landed up in the Impact Framework. I think it's been a journey over the last couple of years, right?

And now, yes, at least we have, we are working towards a mature product or an API, right? Which can help enable any developer, right, to calculate SCI based on their boundary.

Asim Hussain: you're right. I think it basically came around, this is, it basically came around, you actually were, with pen and paper, in its rawest form, trying to calculate the missions of some software, you realize that data was the biggest problem. So then we launched like the data project. And I remember the first thinking we had was like, we, maybe we need to go and create some datasets, but I remember when you guys were starting to investigate this stuff, you were saying like, actually, you know, these datasets already exist, it's not a case of like creating a dataset, it's like we're not even too sure which data sets to use for which contexts. So then you wrote the SCI guide, which then became the "if you want to measure this type of information, use this data set and use it in this way, or use this equation and use it in this way." And so then that evolved to, well, now that's just some text on a page, how do we programmatically help people to actually calculate this stuff in, in a, you know, more scalable way, rather than just giving them content. Navveen, you started to look at this ontology project, which I still, SciOntology, I still love that name. We should have run something with it, but that was all about, like, how do you figure out what it is you're going to measure? That is, that was trying to answer the question, "what is an application?" Like, what are you including?

What are you not including in an application? And then like Srini, you and I were talking about this old project called CarbonQL. And what that was trying to do was trying to create like an API where you could ask this API, like anything. Like I have like. Remember we even came up with like a key format.

If you remember, I'm looking at a server, I'm looking at a server of this type. I'm looking at a server of this type on this cloud. I'm looking at it. So you came up with this, like you could request anything from this API and it was like a facade or something, and it had lots of code we had to just figure out all this logic and come back in with an API. And I can't remember exactly how we got from there to like a YAML file and an Impact Framework that may be lost in time. But we evolved from kind of an API to realizing, actually, this is just not something that we could ever do. It's too big as an API. It's like, it's enormous. It's like, how do you measure everything in the world with one API? So we said, actually, this is software that you're going to write. And then we started talking about that. And I don't know, then we just lost in a whole load of a year's worth of conversations, and then we evolved into where we are right now, which is, how would you describe, let me ask you this question.

This is an interesting question for me. I'm going to ask Srini first. When someone asks you, what is the Impact Framework? How'd you respond? Like, what'd you say to them?

 

Srinivasan Rakhunathan: So, and this question has been asked many times by my engineering team when I have presented, how do we, you know, they try to push through my agenda of having Impact Framework. And I'm trying to do that more and more with the projects that I handle. The key difference, the key USP of Impact Framework is this is by developers and this is for measurement of your development efficiency, development processes, code, as opposed to what we had prior, which was focused on, you know, what are the standards governing emissions?

What are the reporting? What is GSG saying? What is X? You know, this is a star contrast where you're trying to do something that is going to help developers measure emissions from their day to day code, day to day, you know, CICD pipelines. So that's, that resonates, uh, with most of the developers when we talk to them.

And they're more curious, you know, uh, I think, like, one of the things that we also talked about, all of us, is to, how do we make it granular such that the measurement is easy. So developers don't just need the final emission number, they need to know what you did to come to that number. They will not accept, you know, just something that you give to them on a piece of paper.

So I think that is the USP of Impact Framework for me. 

Asim Hussain: Like debugging the carbon emissions of your application is giving you that, you need that granularity. So, you know, like someone just doesn't give you like, "Oh, my carbon score is eight." And you're like, "okay, good. What do I do with that?" It's all of the workings out underneath. And I'm, and I thought it was really fascinating because we had an organization come on our last call, didn't we?

And they showed us their manifest file, which is like 13 megabytes large. So they really went granular and it still only ran in like 20 seconds. I was really impressed with that actually. So Navveen, like, how do you describe Impact Framework to, to whoever you need to describe it to.

Navveen Balani: So, so I described as, as Impact Framework. It's probably a framework that helps you realize the SCI Specification. Uh, and what it means is it helps you basically come up with an SCI score based on, uh, your software boundary. As Srini mentioned, right, it's basically a developer framework that can be used for measuring any software application. And I would even say it's a vendor-neutral framework where you can plug and play your own models or use open source models to come up with a measurement and finally arrive at an SCI score.

Asim Hussain: Yeah, I like that. I forgot. Like, yeah, we, you, you, you're the one that kind of, I remember and the calls like would, was gently nudging us back into like focusing on the SCI, which we, I suppose at that point we kind of got lost in some conversations, but that really focused the, the whole team again quite a few months ago. Do you know, I won't give my definition. I'll actually give a definition that Joseph gave me yesterday in a call that we had. Joseph's the PM for the project. And he described in a very interesting way. He said he's now thinking of it as an executable audit for a software application. And I thought that was a really interesting term, isn't it? An audit, like that manifest file that we're creating is like an audit. And the term executable is like, again, as you're saying, Srini, it's not the final number.

It's like this whole thing that you can re-execute and readjust and value. I think it's been coming up a lot. 'Cause everybody's asking me what is Impact Framework and we're constantly trying to come up with a language for it.

And I just want to maybe just acknowledge the fact that we've come up with something very different. We're kind of like setting like a paradigm here and that's why we're struggling so much to explain to everybody what Impact Framework is. And I'm very excited about that because I think that's when you really change things. We can't even really explain what it is right now. We can only tell you that anybody who gets involved gets really involved and they can really see themselves in it. It's our most popular project in the foundation right now. And when I talk to people externally, there's just a lot of interest in it.

And I'm, and I'm just so excited about it. Should I move on to the questions? I've got some questions. Yeah, should we go ahead? Okay. So here's the first question. So can you explain how the Impact Framework simplifies the process of estimating energy and carbon impact for various applications? So pretty broad question.

So can you explain how the Impact Framework simplifies the process of estimating energy and carbon impact for various applications? Hang on, let me ask this question. Does it simplify? Maybe 'simplify' isn't the right term for what it does. It's quite complicated, isn't it? Maybe it kind of surfaces information in a different way. This is one way of describing a framework. It takes observations about a running system and turns them into impacts. So that's one way. It takes observations about a running system and takes them into impacts. So I suppose one way it simplifies it is if you've got something you are already observing about your running application, like CPUtilization or something else. It can help you then turn that into energy. So that's one way it simplifies it. One other thing that, this is one of the misconceptions people have about Impact Framework when I talk to them about it, is they think it's something that you have to install on every one of your servers, right? Cause that's how most of the things that measure energy work.

They're like, okay, Impact Framework. So how do I install it on my GCP servers or my Azure servers? And I'm like, well, you don't, you just. You know, you just have to tell us what the utilization was of each of your machines and each of your processes and Impact Framework will try and convert that into energy.

So I think that's one way maybe you could say it simplifies it. You don't have to install anything at all? 

Srinivasan Rakhunathan: I think so.

And, uh, when you use the word 'simplify,' Asim, to me, the very fact it's a command line utility, it's a huge bonus, right? You don't have to spin up Kubernetes clusters. You don't have to spin up Spring Boot services. You know, you don't have to host it on an API. You don't need an infrastructure for all that, you know, you can

Asim Hussain: You don't need to instrument any of your applications or code or anything. It's just, yeah. It's just like observing. It's

just looking at it. Yeah. 

Srinivasan Rakhunathan: Exactly. so, so to me that simplification that you can just download the code, you need to know a little bit of Node.js or Yarn or how to use it to just be able to run it. As long as you're able to do that, you're pretty much up and ready. Maybe you, we can even set up a timer Asim how long it takes for someone to run it.

I bet it'll not be more than five minutes. You know,

Asim Hussain: I don't think so. I don't think so. To get the simple, like hello world version of it out with like, yes, sampled, maybe it's use it with your own data. It will take a little bit more time, but to like use it with a sample data, I think five minutes is absolutely yeah. Any thoughts, Navveen, or how, like anything you want to add to that?

Navveen Balani: So I would also say that it simplifies, I mean, if you're a beginner who wants to do software Carbon Emission Measurement, then, I mean, this API, I mean, the turnaround time for basically measuring, let's say, a virtual machine is, uh, maybe a few hours, right? Just going through the API, uh, setting things up. So the barrier to measurement, uh, I think is quite simplified. Given our history, right, where at least we took maybe a month or two months, right, just to go through the entire data capture process, which model to use, right? So all those knowledge, I would say, is accumulated in this tool, right? So the entry point to SCI now is drastically reduced.

Asim Hussain: I remember that being, I remember that was one of the, one of our original kind of design, I don't know if that's a term design decisions or requirements of the tool was to codify the expertise that was in like both of your heads and in the heads of other people, like the very small set of people who've been looking at this to make it easier, because now all you have to do is you just have to like plug in a utilization value, pick a model or a set of models, and it will like compute all that for you instead of like, "which coefficient should I use, which this, which that?" Is kind of all baked into these models. Talking of models, we call them plugins now, don't we? Sorry. We call them plugins now, which I'm having some name changes. So I remember I was chatting the other day.

We originally had this way of thinking, which is we know we need to capture some observations about our running system, be it utilization of virtual machines or billing data or whatever it is, some observations we have. And we always knew we were going to pass it through some sort of model to create some sort of impact, like energy or, or, or whatever. Then at some point we realized it's not, one model isn't going to work. We're going to have to break it out into lots of, and that was a very important decision that we made. I feel like that was like an inflection point. And there was a moment when we were like thinking about this thing in terms of one model rules them all, to hundreds of thousands of models that you can like combine in this kind of Linux piped command line process. I think that was a real breakthrough moment in the project. I think it was something about, were we trying to compare Boavizta, Cloud Carbon Footprint and Teads and these other models together?

Was that what it was? I can't remember what even triggered

Srinivasan Rakhunathan: I'm, I'm also trying to think.

Asim Hussain: Yeah, I think it was something to do with that because CCF did a lot. Oh, I can't remember. Anyway, what are some of, what are some of your favorite models? I was going to ask, like, what are some of your favorite plugins? Or, yeah, like pipeline plugins. I do remember the moment, actually, I think this is quite important, actually, as well, like, when what once we finally had this ability to grab some observations, put it in a YAML file and then pass it through a set. We know that's what we did. God, this is a memory lane. We standardize the interface to these models.

That's the first thing we did. And as soon as we standardize interface to models, we could then. Use the same data and pass it to different models. So we took the same utilization values, suddenly, suddenly, and I can't believe no one had ever really done this, ever. We took the same utilization values and we passed it through the Cloud Carbon Footprint model plugin that we created. We then took it to the Boavizta model plugin, and we then took it to the Teads, there was a Teads model plugin. And the numbers are so different.

I remember that was a real shock for all of us. And I won't go into details, but there was a, almost a 400 percent difference in the energy values from one to another.

Srinivasan Rakhunathan: I think the methodology differences between these datasets were so pronounced, like you talked about Boavizta, you talked about Cloud Carbon Footprint, that with the original concept that we had where we wanted to cover all, we would have had to build multiple flavors of the Impact Framework and there were cost issues in maintenance that would have caused issues in adoption.

I think the standardization of a model plugin was more a decision that we took once we realized that one model is not going to cut the cake for all of us. And You had different models depending on whether you are hosting it on AWS or Azure or GCP or your laptop or even your mobile devices. But if someone wants to just look at the raw emissions from the software, agnostic of the hardware, you could do that only if you have a very thin measurement tool.

Asim Hussain: Yeah. And for instance, also remember at the time I was still at Intel and we were building a model, a plugin for Impact Framework, which obviously would only measure Intel chips. So you had to have multiple models in a pipeline because if you had other vendors' chips, you would need that model in the pipeline as well to like calculate that model, you know, and the way I imagine the future is that vendors themselves would then be releasing their own models. Like my dream, Srini, is like Microsoft releases, I know it's doing the importer model, but then, you know, the future dream in the future is Microsoft releases models for every single one of its services. And if you're using that service, you plug in the Microsoft model for that service. You plug in whatever observation, like let's say it's gigabyte seconds for Azure Functions. You grab your Azure Function's gigabyte seconds, you've got the observations for there. How do you turn that into energy or carbon?

So ideally you just use the Microsoft Azure Functions plugin, plug

it in, and it knows how to convert gigabyte seconds for Azure Functions to whether, whatever it would be like energy probably, or maybe carbon.

I don't know how we'll end up there. So that'll be like, yeah, that'll be the future. My dream would be like, you come to Impact Framework and like, imagine you see like a page which is like hundreds of models and each of these models has like a logo of like some cloud service on it, you know, and you just drag and drop the cloud service that you're using. And then maybe you've even got some like automatic importer which imports the data from your cloud service into it. And boom, it's all working. It's all automatically calculating

Navveen Balani: It'll be probably like a GPT store.

Asim Hussain: A GPT. Yes. Oh yeah. The Impact Framework store where you go to, I could even imagine like, honestly, everything we've done is open source. Everything we're doing is publishing is open source. I'm fine if a commercial entity wants to come along and create a paid-for model, you know, "if you want to use this model, you need to sign a contract and pay us some money and, and use it" because honestly, maintaining a lot of this stuff is very challenging. Like get making these models is a lot of hard work. I'm okay with organizations, hint, hint out there if there's anybody listening, he wants to create a business on top of Impact Framework. It's, I think it's absolutely fine to, to create a plugin that is commercial creates, you know, let's say. I don't know what that would look like, but, you know, it pays money to, to do this properly.

Cause one of the things we're doing is like with one of our models is the Cloud Instance Metadata model. That model, given a cloud instance ID, tells you metadata about it, like the number of virtual CPUs, this, that, and the other. Because there is no good data set. There is no API, which you can go to for that.

So we need to maintain that as a GSF. And that takes time, effort. So if somebody out there wants to, you know, go do that, I think that's perfectly reasonable. Yeah. Why don't you each say what your favorite plugin is so far? I don't know if you have one. Navveen, what's your favorite plugin so far that we've built? I think I know what Srini's going to be. But, uh,

Navveen Balani: Let Srini go 

Asim Hussain: Yeah, Srini go to first. 

Navveen Balani: Let me

Asim Hussain: I'll Srini go first because it's a hard choice, isn't it. Srini, what's yours? If it's not the one I think it's going to be, I'm going to be surprised. Go on.

Srinivasan Rakhunathan: No, it's not the one you're thinking because it's not yet there. 

Asim Hussain: Oh, okay. 

Srinivasan Rakhunathan: Yeah, so I really like the TDP model. Yeah.

Asim Hussain: Like the Teads Curve one,

what we call Teads Curve? Yeah. 

Srinivasan Rakhunathan: Yes. Because that's something that was very manual earlier. I don't think any of the other assets have that capability to give that Teads curve. And for me, while the solution, the technical solution was

simpler, I think, but the concept of having a model in the first place was awesome. I think that's how, you know, keep things simple, that same, the logic that works, right? Because it solves, you can extend the TDP model for any hosting infrastructure. It doesn't have to be a laptop or anything. I can just open my power configuration on my laptop, find out what is the TDP score, and then do a multiplication. 

Asim Hussain: Oh, just plug it. Yeah.

Do you remember when, cause it's Benjamin Davies. We even brought him in to the standards working group one day, like years ago, just to talk through, cause he wrote, he did that. That's, it all started when he wrote that Medium post where they'd done that analysis and he'd like scanned through all of Amazon's bare metal servers, averaged every single server out to like, this is the generic power curve.

That's what we call the Teads curve. I don't know if that's the right term. We just call it the Teads curve, you know?

But like, that's the generic power curve. And then all you need is that data, plus what's called the TDP of a chip, and then without getting too wonky for our audience, then if you, then you can compute the, an estimate of energy for any single chip in the world. So open the door. I remember when that first came out, I was like, I felt like such a relief when Benjamin did that work. Cause prior to that, I was thinking, "Oh my God, we have to sit and figure out this data for every single chip in the entire world on every single device. How are we going to do this?"

And then he came along and went, "ah, I averaged it all out and it works pretty good." So we were like, "okay," and I see that used everywhere. So many places I see that used every, cause it's so easy. It kind of taught me a lesson actually, which is it was so stunningly easy. It was like one sentence could summarize that model. It's just everywhere. It's just absolutely everywhere. It's so simple to use. So yeah, that's a good one. That's the tease one. Yeah. Srini, Srini, you have one? Is it the SCI one? Maybe. No, Navveen.

Sorry. 

Navveen Balani: Probably I'd like to have some AI model. Currently, we don't have one. So probably I'll wait for the hackathon to provide, right? Hopefully, as part of the hackathon, we'll get a lot of good models to evaluate.

Asim Hussain: What would be a good like AI model? Because like. Would it be something that kind of like, looks at it, like, what would the observations, is it prompts? It'd be like, what would be the observation prompts?

Navveen Balani: it'll be, yeah, it'll be an interesting model, I would say, based on the deployment. Uh, for instances, just to give an example, let's say if somebody is using an OpenAPI directly, right? They're just interacting with prompts. So in that case, how do you evaluate the carbon emission given just the prompts, right?

And a lot of these observability data may not be available from OpenAPI. But let's say if you're doing fine tuning or if you're doing your own model, then you will have access to infrastructure, and then you probably can use our existing models. So I would say the first one would be quite interesting where you don't have much information available from vendors.

So how do you come up with emission, right? Just maybe, just based on traction and prompts. Maybe it is prompts, length, latency. Let's see how the community as part of the Hackathon picks up this challenge.

Asim Hussain: I think, like, when I think of the future, like, it's interesting how our world's changed because we used to talk about AI emissions in terms of the training and, like, how long it

takes to train and we used to talk about inference in this very abstract way. And I'll be honest with you in the last six months, everybody just talks about prompts.

Like the word prompt is, and I use, I'll be honest, I use AI co pilots and all this other stuff all the time. And it's like, it's all about prompts, isn't it? I do think, Navveen, I think the future is going to be prompts. Like how many prompts have you made that generate images? Like an image prompt is probably going to be different. You probably have like a coefficient for an image prompt, code prompt, an LLM prompt, something like that. At least in terms of the way humans are working with AI these days. I think prompts is like the key. Yeah. And when you see like articles and stuff out there, it's always like, "Oh, on average prompts cause this impact" that I think I see the language being used that way. So, yeah.

Navveen Balani: I think that probably brings up to, I think, one of the challenges that we still need to solve around managed services, right? A lot of these, if you treat also OpenAPI, right, servicing offer as a managed service, now how do you calculate the carbon emissions? For instance, serverless is a very good example. So you have to use some kind of approximation, right? Because based on time or resources So expect similar models once we get more data and clarity, right? Yeah, we'll reach there.

Asim Hussain: Yeah. I think that's a really interesting, yeah. Maybe we'll get you, let's propose something in the, so there's a Carbon Hack coming up, a Hackathon coming up in a, in a couple of months around Impact Framework. I was going to mention at the end, let's talk right now, actually. 'Cause that actually, 'cause obviously there's going to be prizes for the best kind of models and plugins that we're describing right now.

And, and then Navveen, just as we're talking right now, I think I would love to see, as you say, like some submissions, and we can post in the ideas forum on the hackathon website, like. I'd love to see, you know, turn prompts into emissions. 

That might be a right, that actually is turning into like a bit of a working session on Impact Framework that actually might be a good way for us to influence direction of what people are building in the hackathon is what we just described is like, "what are the observations that we want people to try and figure out the impacts for?" So I want to help figure out the impacts of prompts.

We talked about serverless, serverless, the observation for serverless is something called gigabyte seconds. Help me convert gigabyte seconds to energy. Like I can, I've got some ideas for that. Like, yeah, that's how we should think about this. We should be thinking about, we should be saying like, these are the observations that would be the most useful for us to create models, to turn those observations into impacts. So I don't know, I don't know what other observations that we have. Like billing data is obviously oftentimes a fallback.

Srinivasan Rakhunathan: GPU utilization is also there, I think.

Asim Hussain: Yeah. GPU utilization. Yeah. Or like, what about a non-cloud? Well, here's an observation. Yeah. Gigabytes transferred. Yeah. Write a model to turn gigabytes transferred into.

Srinivasan Rakhunathan: Emission.

Asim Hussain: What other observations are there, like from the web space, your observation might be page views. There's already models that do that, like page views.

Maybe this, oh, I think we've hit on something just now. I've been struggling to try and like, how do we encourage, how do we direct people? But I think this is how we direct people, which is: These are observations that we want to be able to model, submit, think it through. And we can, we can submit, but yeah, there's lots of others.

It's just late in the day. So just final question. So let's talk about this. Like, you know, we've been just building the alpha and beta version of this. And you know, there are some people using it right now, but let's just talk it through amongst ourselves, like in practical terms, how would you see, you know, a software developer, a practitioner or a company just start using the Impact Framework?

Like how would you. Imagine if you were talking to a company, what would the very first steps? What would you, what would the conversation be? Like, I'll tell you what I've been thinking about this stage. 'Cause I've really loved the idea of this term that Joseph used, which is like executable audit, maybe it's an audit. Maybe it's a, "bring me in, like what software do you want me to audit? Oh, you want me to audit your XYZ software. Okay. Give me your data. Give me your observations. I'm going to write a YAML file. I'm going to write a manifest file. And at the end, here's a file which gives you. All the emissions of this software over the last month," something like that.

Is that how you would start off or, or are you seeing the conversations go different ways? Srini, I'm seeing you like, I think you think differently. I'm just starting to suspect your mind looks looking, your face is looking.

Srinivasan Rakhunathan: No, I think, see. One scenario we've already seen, Asim, right, is many people are talking about region shifting and time shifting. So if you're running a workload based on the carbon intensity of the underlying region of data center or whatever, electricity grid, people are talking about, and I think many cloud providers have implemented it even to shift their workloads behind the scenes without.

With or without your consent to a different region which is more greener. Now, if people have accepted that as a new normal, then why are we waiting till the operational aspects of the software? Why can't we look at the development cycle, left shift the entire process, give the tool to, there are projects which have 80 developers, 100 developers, 120 developers.

Today, nobody has any idea of how many dev environments, prod environments, pre-prod environments. I think, unless you show people numbers and show people how to measure them, the real impact of what is translating into carbon emissions doesn't even come through. So I think a lot of value is there when it's a practical, when you talk to companies who are in this cloud migration initiatives or huge initiatives, multi year, multi semester initiatives, there is a lot of value in even calculating it at a development level.

Why do we even wait for the operational aspects of, you know, calculating emissions? So I think that is a USP for sure.

Asim Hussain: So I think you mentioned two things that were interesting. One was like. I think you were alluding to this whole idea of once you've got this kind of like Impact Framework manifest file, you can do this kind of what if scenarios that you're alluding to that, right?

So once you've got that manifest file, when you were saying shifting left, were you talking about once you got that audit effectively, once you walk in and you audit your application, and like, "here's my inventory," passing that to the developers and the team going, "by the way, this is everything that you're running. You can run some scenario, don't build CarbonAware computing, just add the CarbonAware scenario model to the end of the pipeline to simulate what it would look like if the CarbonAware was," it kind of gets that kind of, yeah, helps, it almost helps like model, like what if scenarios in, in that environment. And the other thing you were talking about, it was almost like, yeah, you mentioned cloud migration. In my experience, cloud migration is this kind of like, no matter what you do, it's just this messy thing. It's very confusing. You start off with like a very clear idea, a very clear plan. It's very messy and you're not really sure what's going on.

And by the end, you're very clear again, cause you're in the cloud and you've got some good metrics. I remember there was one organization that was reaching us out to the start. And they were like, we're moving to the cloud. And we wanted to measure using Impact Framework on premise. And then consistently measure as we slowly migrate our replication to the cloud. And that way, the audit from Impact Framework should then change slowly over time. Because theoretically, like the cloud is more environmentally better. Then that would have given them that clarity in that migration process. Which we were too late. They did the migration before we, we completed in where we are right now.

But anyway, that was an interesting thought. Navveen, I think because you work in the consulting scene, you actually speak to a lot more customers and clients than us. Like, I don't know, like, what do you have, do you have conversations? Like, how do you have conversations to them about the Impact Framework?

Navveen Balani: So to extend to the simulation example, right, I think a lot of cloud vendors provide calculators, right, to calculate, let's say, the cost based on virtual machines, the entire infrastructure, right? So if you could put the element of carbon and emission also, right, because they know how the infrastructure is set up. And now they can do a simulation based on both cost as well as the carbon emission and also do simulations that reducing carbon also reduces your cost, right? So a lot of, I think enterprise wants to do a lot of FinOps activity, maintain the cost also, right? Sustainability of this tool, right, can be good uh, outcome to reduce their cost also. That can be also a value proportion to lower, I mean, lower the carbon footprint as well as the lower, the total cost of ownership.

Asim Hussain: There is nothing, I would say, stopping anybody using impact for any, like cost as an impact. There's nothing stopping anybody using it just to look at cost and then scenario cost reductions as well. So, okay, I think we're running out of time now today. So let me just maybe just close out statement. I also want to give it a bit of a call out to the Carbon Hack. So thank you both again for like, I know we chat every week, but thank you both for having another chat here. I think it's been such an exciting journey that we've been on. So that's just about it for our deep dive into the Impact Framework. Before we head off, I just have a quick announcement about CarbonHack24. CarbonHack is a global contest for developers who want to make a difference in the fight against climate change. It challenges participants to use the Impact Framework, which we've just been speaking about in depth. The theme of CarbonHack this year is measurement. We want to see how you can use Impact Framework to measure the carbon emissions. You know, other, we're also talking beyond carbon this year. So we have a prize of, you know, water, carbon, other things like that. If you could help us to write plugins for Impact Framework, which help us measure beyond carbon. We would love it. That's really where we want to move the conversation. We have kind of basically three prize categories.

One is the best plugin, which is like what we've just been describing, which is like something that can take an observation and turn it into something else is a plugin beyond carbon is a price for us for a type of plugin, which can take an observation and turn it into like a water or a. Or another beyond carbon type of type of measurement.

And we also have a prize for best content. So if you can help us to explain Impact Framework better than we're explaining it ourselves, there's actually a prize for that. That's like a non technical prize, whether it's a video or a tutorial or anything like that. We also have an undergraduates prize. So if your entire team is made up of undergraduates who are university, there's a special prize for you in addition to the prizes. And we've also now got to confirm, I don't know if I told you, but we've now got to confirm that we can have an under 18s prize. So if your entire team is made up of under 18s, there is again, an additional prize just for you on top of everything else. So I'm very excited about that. So CarbonHack is online.

It's starting on the 18th of March and ends on the 8th of April. You're going to compete to showcase your best application in the prize categories I've just spoken about. The hackathon is open to all, but you must register to be part of it. Registration begins on January 22nd. 

Please head to hack.greensoftware.foundation. It's a pre-register. And once you're there, then we'll send you further emails about how to get, how to get more involved. So please go hack.greensoftware.foundation, register now. It's all in the show notes. So we've come to the end of our podcasts. All is left for me to say, thank you so much to Navveen and Srini.

That was really great. Thank you for your contribution. And we really appreciate you coming to Environment Variables.

Navveen Balani: Yeah. Thank you everyone. Looking forward to the Hackathon.

Srinivasan Rakhunathan: Thanks. Thanks for the opportunity and looking forward to meeting you guys in future as well.

Asim Hussain: Awesome. That's all for this episode of Environment Variables. All the resources for this episode are in the show description below. And you can visit podcast. greensoftware. foundation to listen to more episodes of Environment Variables. See you all in the next episode. Bye for now. 

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 episode.

Host Chris Adams is joined by Arik Smith and Cameron Cash from Thoughtworks in this episode of Environment Variables. Together they discuss the Cloud Carbon Footprint (CCF) tool and the role it plays in sustainable software development. Join this conversation as they nerd out together about the future of measuring carbon in the cloud, open source collaboration, and some cool posters in the background.

Learn more about our people:

• Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | Website
• Arik Smith: LinkedIn
• Cameron Casher: LinkedIn

Find out more about the GSF:

• The Green Software Foundation Website 
• Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter

News:

• Responsible Technology Playbook: Tools for the United Nations | Thoughtworks [06:40] 
• GCS23: Cameron Casher on Responsible Tech & Cloud Carbon Footprint [07:05]
• Cloud Carbon Footprint [09:25]
• Etsy Engineering | Cloud Jewels: Estimating kWh in the Cloud [12:41] 
• 20231124 - green coding summit - ai environmental impacts assessment workshop [26:19]
• 20231124 - green coding summit - infra/cloud environmental impacts assessment workshop [26:52]

Resources:

• Arik’s awesomely distracting looking poster [02:36]
• Notes from the SDIA Green Coding summit [07:05]
• (GreenOps) A forecast of green clouds | Thoughtworks [08:18]
• Green Software Patterns [08:24]
• Electricity Maps API Documentation [28:36]
• Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) Specification Project | GSF [32:38]
• GitHub - cloud-carbon-footprint/cloud-carbon-footprint [38:04]

If you enjoyed this episode then please either:

• Follow, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts
• Follow and rate on Spotify
• Watch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!
• Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!

TRANSCRIPT BELOW:

Arik Smith: [00:00:00] At the end of the day, CCF is a community supported and collaborative tool, and I think that's the biggest and strongest part of all is that this isn't a methodology that one organization has owned or came up with, but that the, I want to say the entire industry who really cares about this subject has contributed and promoted growth within.

Chris Adams: 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, Chris Adams. Hello, and welcome to another episode of Environment Variables, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software [00:01:00] development. I'm your host, Chris Adams. In our first episode of Environment Variables, we spoke about the team working on Cloud Carbon Footprint, about the subject of carbon calculation in the cloud. And a lot has happened since that episode. We've basically seen a spawn of imitators, and we've seen a launch of a number of native new platforms that various cloud providers use to help people understand the environmental impact of using digital services. Cloud Carbon Footprint has remained the open source reference, and as we'll discuss in more detail, parts of it end up making it into all kinds of other services these days. So it's been a while since we spoke about Cloud Carbon Footprint, or even Carbon Calculation in total. So joining me today are two of the main maintainers of the project to dive into some of the weeds on this. All right, today I'm joined by Cam and Arik. Folks, I'll just give you the space [00:02:00] to introduce yourselves.

Cam, if I give you the floor, then Arik, I guess you can introduce yourself after that.

Cameron Casher: Thanks, Chris. Really happy to be here. I'm Cameron Kasher. I work at ThoughtWorks on software, data, sustainability, general responsible tech, and really happy to talk to you today about Cloud Carbon Footprint.

Chris Adams: Cool, thank you. And Arik?

Arik Smith: Hey, I'm Arik Smith. I also work as a developer consultant at ThoughtWorks, mainly as a cloud SME and a green software specialist. But I am also excited to be here, so thanks for having me.

Chris Adams: You're very welcome. I'm excited here, but I'm also quite excited by that awesome looking poster that I can see inside the video. I'm afraid that you can't see it in the audio, but there looks like there's a Japanese poster behind you. Is that Zelda or something? Arik, can you please tell me what that is, because it's totally distracting, but it looks really awesome.

Arik Smith: Yeah, for sure. So behind me I have my home office, which is basically in my basement that I call my culture cave. So what [00:03:00] you're looking at is what I call my wall of culture, where I just hang up artwork that I usually find at local vendors around town, mainly around my favorite video games and movies.

So yeah, the poster is a poster with Link on it and in Japanese katakana, it says Zelda, but there's also some other stuff on there. I have an Avatar poster right next to it for The Last Airbender, and a Final Fantasy VII, and an Arcane League of Legends poster. Lots of fun stuff going on. 

Chris Adams: Wow that's an impressive nerd cave, and I think anyone who's been following Zelda this year will probably be excited about a reference to Tears of the Kingdom, amongst other things. All right, and Cam, we met in person, actually, about a month ago, when you came over to Berlin for the Green Coding Summit, and I A, I realized you were so much taller than me, oh my god, but also I didn't realize whereabouts that you were coming from.

So you were coming from Colorado before, and at the time of recording, this is the 21st of December, so there's a bunch [00:04:00] of really explosive political news that might impact what will happen with elections next year. But, as much as I do want to talk about that, and what the climate implications of having different leadership in America might be, I think I should ask you about one thing you told me about, skiing in Colorado. That's a thing that you do on a regular, right?

Cameron Casher: Yeah, it was great to see you in the flesh in Berlin. It was really awesome to be there. And yes, Colorado has found itself at the forefront of U. S. politics at the moment. So, that's exciting. And, yeah, we're in uh, ski season here. I'm excited to get out and snowboard a bit. But still waiting on some of the good snow to hit some of the Colorado ski resorts, but I'll be trying to get some days in this winter for sure.

Chris Adams: Nice. Okay, cool. I'm calling from Berlin, and if you haven't heard this podcast before, I should probably introduce myself as well. My name is Chris Adams. I work as the executive director of the [00:05:00] Green Web Foundation, a small Dutch non profit focusing on reaching an entirely fossil free internet by 2030. But I'm also one of the chairs of the Green Software Foundation's policy working group, where we do work with standards bodies and other organizations working in this field of sustainable software and general sustainability. All right, I think with that in place, I should ask you folks, are you sitting comfortably?

Looks like you are. Okay, then I guess I'll begin. Okay, Cameron, I'll ask you about this because you were talking about this notion of responsible tech when you came over in Berlin, and then maybe that will use that as a way to talk about some of the projects that you've been working on. Maybe we could just open with what this notion of the Responsible Tech Playbook that you're presenting, because that looks like it provides a bit of context and that helps understand where tools and carbon calculation might actually fit into the context of using technology in a more responsible basis.

If you could start there, maybe.

Cameron Casher: Yeah, [00:06:00] definitely. I know you'll probably hint to this, but we can definitely link to these resources in the podcast description. But 

Chris Adams: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for reminding me. If you hear any projects mentioned or anything like that, and if we don't put it in the show notes, please do let us know, because we realize that people who listen to this podcast often use every single project as a jump off board for their own research. So we will do everything we can to make sure this is useful for other people who are taking their first steps or trying to explore this new field. All right, Cameron, yes, you were saying we were, you were

presenting about this, yeah.

Cameron Casher: So ThoughtWorks has done some really cool stuff in the area of responsible tech. We had a playbook that came out a couple years ago. And really cool thing recently is we got in touch with some folks at the United Nations and they were very interested in our Responsible Tech Playbook. So we were able to do some really cool work partnering with them to create a more customized [00:07:00] version of it. They're very large around the world and they have a lot of people doing a lot of great stuff. So incorporating responsible tech principles and practices was very important to them and doing it in a more customizable way. So that's what I talked about in Berlin a bit at the Green Code Summit about what the playbook was.

So maybe it's worth just defining what we consider responsible tech.

Chris Adams: Yeah, go for it.

Cameron Casher: We consider responsible tech as the active consideration of values, unintended consequences, and negative impacts of technology. A lot of times these tend to go overlooked. It's not always necessarily a negative intention when developing technology, but really it's, the idea is to manage and mitigate potential risk and to be inclusive to all communities.

There are a lot of different topics we cover in the playbook, including data and AI. Accessibility is a big one, but what I really focused on in [00:08:00] Honestly, because a bit of my background was sustainability, so I was able to shift the focus at the conference talking about it, but also help get a really cool chapter in the playbook around sustainability and how we could incorporate the idea of GreenOps and incorporating Cloud Carbon Footprint.

Chris Adams: Okay, and GreenOps in this scenario is essentially what DevOps is to developing. GreenOps is to this same idea, like it's essentially operationalizing some of the kind of aspects of green software. Is that the idea behind it?

Cameron Casher: Yeah, and another ops really, there's a ton of ops these days, but the idea is tying it really close to DevOps or FinOps too, from a more financial standpoint, really considering green software, carbon emissions, carbon footprint within your development process.

Chris Adams: Ah, okay, so that makes sense. And now I understand the link between there and Cloud Carbon Footprint in its own right, which basically ends up essentially using some of the [00:09:00] usage data that gets produced as a byproduct of operating various digital services and then providing that in a way that you can act upon, or do something, or, or, you shouldn't.

Arik, I see you nodding, so I suspect maybe I should actually give some space for you here. Maybe you can introduce Cloud Carbon Footprint to people who have never heard of this, and why someone who is a software engineer who is curious about environmental sustainability in this context might care about it or want to know about it.

Arik Smith: Yeah, absolutely. Cloud Carbon Footprint is an open source tool for tracking your energy usage and carbon emissions across All the major cloud providers, AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure. And, which we can talk about later, we've also added, or begun to add support for Alibaba Cloud as well. It's a great tool, it serves as an unopinionated monorepository of multiple toolkits for you to go about grabbing your estimates.

So we have a CLI, uh, or a command line interface you can interact with, uh, we have an [00:10:00] API that you can integrate into existing workloads or directly carry, as well as an out of the box dashboard for visualizing and tracking your emissions over time. Um, and we present this at a daily granularity, sometimes even hourly.

Because what we do is we query your usage from your billing data. So think about AWS, Athena, costing usage reports, exports, or your Google Cloud, BigQuery, billing data exports, or your Azure cost details API or exports. We take all of that in the granular usage data that they use and convert that into energy where we can then convert that into carbon emissions to display.

Chris Adams: Ah, cool, okay, so anything that can basically expose billing data or usage data can then basically provide a single view across maybe in a state or a different set of services. So rather than having 3 or 4 competing and possibly incompatible calculators, you have one [00:11:00] consistent way of looking at this stuff, right?

Arik Smith: Absolutely, yep, you'll have one unified methodology to be able to view your usage across multiple cloud providers all within a single dashboard or a single place, which is great just to get a holistic view of where you stand and comparing apples to apples in that way.

Chris Adams: Gotcha. All right, okay. Now, I know that I've been somewhat familiar with Cloud Carbon Footprint and there's a bit of a backstory behind how it came about, because I think there was actually a few years ago there was some really like pioneering work from some folks at Etsy who started on some of this. I'll leave that open for either of you to actually talk a bit about that, because I think there's a really interesting story about how some of this work done in the open there ends up turning into a tool which ends up feeling a little bit like, you know, that XKCD cartoon where there's that one piece of project that everything gets built on? That's how I see a bunch of this. And maybe I, maybe I'll let one of you folks explain some of the origins of this and how that end up, how some of that led to [00:12:00] CCF, or Cloud Carbon Footprint, being like an open source project with a number of users.

Arik Smith: Yeah, absolutely. So within ThoughtWorks itself, there was a lot of growing interest within climate action and getting a hold of our own infrastructure and where our footprint stands with that, especially within our cloud resources. And what we found was that there was not really a tool to do so at the time.

So this was about, and Cam, feel free to correct me on timing, but I believe about 2020, where the bulk of this work was done. And being ThoughtWorkers, we typically decided to look into ways we could perhaps create a way for ourselves to measure our own cloud usage. And we came across Etsy's awesome Cloud Jewels methodology and saw the way that they were estimating compute resources within the cloud, and it served as a great basis and foundation for us to build and find out how can we do that for Google Cloud and AWS and Azure, all the [00:13:00] different cloud providers that we have some level of usage within.

So we started building out a proof of concept to estimate our own internal usage and eventually we made the decision that due to the absence of any tooling out there that this is something everyone should have because we want to empower all organizations and all users to be able to have this level of transparency with their cloud usage because the compute resources and overall energy usage of the IT industry in general is a big major part of our global footprint, especially in major large tech companies and large scale product companies.

We went open source back in March 2021, and since then we've been iterating on it ever since until the cloud providers came out with their own native tools, which is great, and we saw more and more tools and interests popping up in this space.

Chris Adams: okay. That's cool. So basically there's this OG climate calculation stuff, uh, from Etsy, and then that big, that served as some of the basis for a more polished [00:14:00] tool that could be used in lots of different contexts, rather than just the ones that Etsy used, because I think back then, Etsy had a bunch of on-prem stuff and a bunch of Google Cloud, so that was where some of it looked like, but when CCF became, I think the first version that I saw, actually had support for both AWS and a bit of Google Cloud, and now it's actually got support for, like you said, all the big ones, plus Alibaba, I didn't know about Alibaba, actually.

it. 

Arik Smith: Yeah, Alibaba is limited to compute resources for now, but we're still looking into ways to expand that. Um, similar to how we did Um, at the beginning with Etsy, they were estimating cloud, um, compute resources. And then we started thinking about how can we expand that to memory and to networking. And all of that has been a collaborative effort, which is why we call out Etsy within our methodology as the basis from where we started from.

Like even just the networking estimations. We work with Benjamin Davey from Teads based on a write up he did for estimating network as well as embodied admissions and iterated within the other [00:15:00] usage levels within the same way.

Chris Adams: Ah, cool. I think I remember, actually, there's a bit of work by David Mitton there, when he did some work around the CPU coefficient stuff as well. I realize I'm diving into, like, loads of really nerdy stuff, uh Cam, I see you nodding, so maybe I'll let you just touch on some of that stuff, because I think it might be worth talking a little bit about where else this turns up, because we've seen a number of calculators kind of launch now.

A lot of them either reference CCF, or have started using that as a basis. But before, though, I'm getting ahead of myself, yeah. Maybe I'll give the space for you, Cameron, because I saw you getting a bit excited there when we were talking about some of that.

Cameron Casher: Yeah, what's funny is the opportunity to speak here today with you gave us, gave Arik and I a chance to be a little retrospective about our time with CCF and think about lessons learned and what's gone on, what's been challenging. And yeah, even just hearing Arik talk about our partnerships and collaboration, I think it's just worth saying that's been a really cool aspect of being an open source maintainer. [00:16:00] Just being able to openly work with the community, being able to have really awesome discussions with industry experts like David Mitton or Benjamin Davey or everyone at Etsy to just continually evolve the methodology for CCF and make it better, make it fit users, and getting into some of the challenges, I don't know if it's necessarily a challenge, but it's just a tough point is that. We don't have the best transparency into who's using the tool, and I think that's a pretty common trend for open source software, but a lot of it is just through word of mouth, or even when I was in Berlin and talked about it, I got the chance to meet a lot of people that approached me and let me know that they were using CCF, which is, it's really cool to hear about that and the impact that it's had.

Chris Adams: Oh, thanks, Cam. So you mentioned David, uh, David Mitton, and, uh, and I realize there's a couple of other people who are also involved in this as well. I mean, well, the original person on the podcast was, uh, [00:17:00] uh, Danielle, uh, oh, Cameron, I need you to help me with her surname. What was Danielle's surname again?

Because she was

the original product manager on this.

Cameron Casher: Danielle Erickson, and she was, yeah, one of the first guests, and she was a very integral role with the open source launch and continued feature development for CCF as our project manager. So, um, yeah, Danielle had a serious role. And also Lisa McNally, who is the, also on the policy working group with you, um, she helped spearhead a lot of our development too.

And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Marco Valtas, who had a significant role on the dev team as well.

Chris Adams: Oh, cool. I'm really glad you mentioned that, actually. And, uh, actually going back, Jesus, in a few years back now, oh, uh, was, uh, I believe Chelsea, Chelsea, I think it's Chelsea Mozen. She was one of the people who was organizing Climate Action Tech back in 2019 2020, and, uh, I learned so much from her, and she was one of the people really pushing the stuff at Etsy as well.

So, it's, I'm really glad [00:18:00] you spoke about some of the other people, because there's a whole lineage of people who've been contributing to this now over the years.

Cameron Casher: And so many people are coming to mind and, you know, even Dan Lewis-Toakley, who's been a part of the Green Software Foundation, really spearheaded the open source launch too, in the early days. So important to include him as well.

Chris Adams: Yeah, happy days.

Cameron Casher: So I think we're just trying to look for ways to have a better understanding of who's using it.

We have an adopters markdown file in our GitHub repo. We're still trying to get the word out that we want to know what your story is and what your experience has been with CCF. And we have a blog that we just put on the microsite and we're very open to just sharing stories and experiences to providing help for anyone new who wants to try and get it set up at their organization or just for their own personal use.

Chris Adams: I can definitely speak to this because, uh, we maintain, where I work, we maintain a library called CO2.js, which we know is used in a few places, like, uh, we [00:19:00] spoke to Mozilla, and it's in their browser, which is cool, and we work with some other people where we collaborated, but then sometimes it turns up in totally random places.

So, like, I did a talk, um, in Hungary, uh, and I was invited to speak at this event, and then when it was launched, I found out that it was actually used inside one of the key projects that people were actually launching on the day. I was like, "oh! Wow, that's cool and unexpected, but nice to know," right? And I feel that seems to be some of the cases when I see with CCF, because I know that, um, there's a tool called GreenPixie, which is a quite well developed, quite sophisticated commercial product that initially had some origins with CCF, where they use some of that.

I understand, I believe, I think VMware uses some parts of it, as well as IBM. So it turns up in all these interesting places that I didn't, that I hadn't thought about. And when I actually was at the same event as you. I didn't realize the footprint it had in the financial services industry. And that was the thing that really blew my mind, actually, and this, it's, I guess it kind of does [00:20:00] make sense, really, because if you don't have access to information here, having an open methodology is quite useful, and we, at that event, we saw at least one person from a well known bank, ABN AMRO, this is like one of the third largest banks in the Netherlands, they basically said, we're a regulated organization, we, when we calculated our emissions, it's like 40 percent of our carbon footprint comes from our use of digital services.

So we want to have an open tool that doesn't have us rely on a single thing and lets us be transparent with both our regulators, but also our sustainability teams. And this was actually mind blowing that you'd actually have companies talking about this because for the longest time, people tend to either don't say too much about what the environmental impact of digital services might be in their organization, or they say it's very low.

So to have organizations say, yeah, we're using it, this is what we use as our basis, and this is how we calculate it, was mind blowing. It was really useful to see that actually because Like you said, it's really hard to see, and it would be so nice to know that it's [00:21:00] reassuring to find people using your projects, but sometimes it's so hard, you do ask yourself, like, could we have found out another, did I have to really fly across the Atlantic to find out that people are using this tool?

Cameron Casher: Yeah. Yeah. And I'll just add, I think we might touch on this a bit too, but our roadmap, how we decide what we want to continue to build and look into is really community driven. So it's really helpful to understand how people are using CCF to help us understand what to fix or implement. Yeah, it's just very important, really.

Chris Adams: So maybe we can talk a little bit about that then, because we spoke about roadmaps, and like I saw you nodding along when you were thinking about some of the things that are on this list, and I realize that you've been implementing some of this. Are there any kind of, like, exciting things that you're looking forward to seeing the light of day, or being able to work on, that you're really thinking, "Ah, I cannot wait for this to be visible," for example?

Arik Smith: Yeah, absolutely. So we have a few things in the works that I think are [00:22:00] exciting. One of the big things is a lot of improvements we've been trying to do this year is to our overall implementation of Azure, as well as just performance and scalability, which has been one of the biggest lessons learned during the time that we've been developing CCF.

Because ThoughtWorks itself isn't a product company, so we don't have a lot of internal cloud usage. So really learning and leveraging partners and collaborators and sometimes even clients to figure out what type of issues or what type of considerations that enterprise level product companies will have when using CCF has been really helpful and what we've been really leaning into.

And even just Azure as well, because Azure has a Different implementation where it's more API based instead of SQL based like your Google Cloud BigQuery or your AWS Athena, which we interact with for usage. So we currently have a migration going on to migrate to some of the new ways that Azure has made available to [00:23:00] grab billing data.

And one of that is through their new Cost Details API, which we were previously using their Consumption Management API. And then as well as the ability to export cost into an Azure blob and be able to parse a large amount of data from that. So that's currently in the works and we can't, we think this will help a lot of large scale Azure users, which unfortunately due to the differences in implementation.

tends to lag a little bit behind in some of the ways we deal with the other cloud providers. But also, even beyond that, we've seen a lot of interest in Trying to get a grasp of usage and cost for Kubernetes workloads and clusters. And we have a really cool partnership coming up in ways we are looking into collaborating with OpenCost, another open source tool for diving into Kubernetes spend and finding ways to use CCF as a basis to showcase energy [00:24:00] usage and carbon emissions alongside the data that they show within the tool.

We've done a similar collaboration in the past with Backstage, making CCF a plugin for their platform. And that is also another cool opportunity coming up because people use open costs and we're trying to really leverage the ways that CCF is flexible and extensible to where you can still use CCF's methodology as we've seen

in some of the other tools we mentioned, but also in your existing toolkit, and that's why we keep referring to it as a tool and not just a product, because it's really just a means to an end to be able to get transparency into your cloud usage and carbon footprint. I think those are two of the biggest things.

Oh, and we also have Boavizta, but I may actually toss that to Cam because that's something he's been a little bit closer

to to talk about. 

Chris Adams: Alright, Cam, before we go into that, I just want to, I realise that we didn't actually speak about this now, um, CCF [00:25:00] is a open source product, um, it's presumably written, is it TypeScript or JavaScript? Maybe we could just touch on that briefly because I realize that we didn't actually talk about any of that, uh, and it might be useful for people who are curious about taking their first steps, right?

Arik Smith: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, CCF is an open source monorepository, all written in TypeScript. And that was a deliberate decision because we wanted to have a single language used across the entire codebase to make contributions and onboarding to the project easier. So if you're looking for an open source project to contribute to, we welcome it.

Even if you just want to read the methodology and provide feedback, we welcome that as well. But yeah, so the dashboard itself mainly leverages React. It has a simple React dashboard for visualizing your data with the API being in Express and the rest being in native TypeScript. Tried to keep it simple, but,

Chris Adams: so it's stuff that people are likely to be, to use, it's not something like written in Sorry [00:26:00] Haskell Friends, like Haskell, or something which is not that popular. Okay, cool.

All right, Cam, yeah. Cam, you were about to talk about some of the other things on the roadmap that you, uh, touched on. I think, maybe it might be worth just briefly explaining what Boavizta is, because if people haven't heard of Boavizta, they might not know about the cool French guys and, uh, women working in that particular project.

Cameron Casher: Yeah, Boavizta actually had a really cool workshop at the summit that we were at in Berlin. And they were explaining some of the ways that you can go about measuring the energy from some of your server usage, which is some really cool work and props to those guys who did an excellent job there. Because I think there was a really good collaboration in that workshop and it was pretty well received and spawned a lot of great conversation.

Chris Adams: I agree with you on that. I remember, so the, so the thing with, the interesting about Boavizta is like, we'll share a link to the workshop, because one thing that was nice is they did this, Boavizta led one of these workshops about understanding [00:27:00] the both embodied energy and the usage energy in cloud, but they did another one about AI as well, but they were gracious enough to share the entire decks and everything online as well, so we'll add some links to that.

So we've established Boavizta, that was one thing, but you mentioned there's some other products or other kind of integrations that are on the roadmap that you might be talking about, possibly also with French speaking people involved, I suppose.

Cameron Casher: Yeah. So I guess for context, we, with our methodology, we've had to rely on a lot of other public and open datasets since a lot of the information around carbon or energy estimations, we haven't been able to grab directly from the major cloud providers, at least just yet, we are really reliant on some of the open data sets we find.

And with that comes a lot of manual updating and monitoring to make sure we're aware of when some of these data sets get published with new information, this really led us to the idea of wanting to [00:28:00] more automate the way that people could get some of this data, whether it's energy estimations for servers or even carbon intensity values. What I really wanted to try and do lately is almost integrate feature toggles. You can always default to some of this average data from the publicly available sources, but if you have a Boavizta subscription or however you'd connect, then maybe you could select that as your way to get some server information from some of your, let's say AWS vCPUs. Or another thing that we wanted to express was our partnership with Electricity Maps. This is another company over in Europe that's doing a really great job around understanding real time carbon intensity values from regions globally around the world. This is really nice for CCF because you can really get more accurate carbon [00:29:00] intensity data, which is a integral part of our estimation for carbon emissions in our methodology. And some of the work we were able to do lately was map the Electricity Map zones to cloud provider regions. So you're able to directly connect. If you have a subscription to Electricity Maps, you essentially just pick a box and say you want to use this and get to see some of their data and map it to some of the daily values that you'll see from your cost and usage report.

Chris Adams: Ah, I see. Okay, so if I, to make that a little bit more concrete, when you often have, say, some values which might be, so people often talk about the idea that you can maybe change a region to reduce the environmental impact. Let's say you're using AWS, and on one part of the United States, on the Eastern Seaboard, New Virginia, not Eastern Seaboard, but North Virginia, yeah, that's going to be using a bunch of coal, and you, but on the other side, you might have, say, in Oregon, it's going to be a very [00:30:00] kind of like cleaner grid by comparison, but there may be other places which might fluctuate at various times and that will capture some of those changes specifically that an Electricity Map would give you, right?

If there's maybe times of day where it's particularly sunny and windy, you'd have green energy there and it would actually reflect that in the billing, for example, or show it in your stats in a given day or hour, right?

Cameron Casher: Right. And the really cool thing about their API is that we are able to grab historic data. And a lot of people using CCF are wanting to see what their usage looks like for the past year or two. So we're able to actually map on those given days of their usage, backtrack and backfill. And yeah, they also offer hourly estimations too.

That's something we're looking forward to potentially implementing for CCF is estimations on an hourly basis.

Chris Adams: Ah, I did not know that. That's very cool to know. All right, because this is one of the scenarios that I'm curious about. Because once you do actually have like enough usage data, you often, the question is, it's almost hypothetical. [00:31:00] "Now I know I've been doing this year. What could I have done so that I can inform like future discussions?"

This is why, because a lot of the time having maybe a bunch of historical data and then being able to see would it have made a difference if I switched to another region, or would it have made a difference if I moved a particular piece of job that happened, a computing job that happened every single time at this time, could I have measured that?

And it sounds like this, these are some of the tooling that actually makes some of that possible, so you can start comparing what you would do then, say this is what we should be doing next year, now that we've actually got some of our own usage data and some carbon information about what, where we might go from there.

Cameron Casher: Yeah, and I know a lot of organizations that are trying to set their sustainability goals for the future and even in the case of ThoughtWorks, having that baseline year is very important where you can set a year and be able to say, okay, this is our baseline. This is where we want to measure up against as we try and hit some of our goals that we're setting, like our 5 or 10 year plans.

Being able to see that historic data is very important today. If you want to [00:32:00] set 2023 as your baseline, you can see what your cloud carbon footprint looks like from that year and just move forward and try and improve it.

Chris Adams: Ah, okay. That's helpful because basically the entire sector needs to halve its emissions by 2030 in order to stay on the kind of pipe, on the trajectory for 1.5 degrees. And I guess that gives you some context that works out to be about a saving, you need to reduce emissions by between seven to 10% per year depending on what you have.

And this might give you a way of saying, "okay. Here's what they are now, this year, this is what we need to beat or stay inside if we're going to be on track." Huh, I didn't know that.

Okay, 

Cameron Casher: Yeah. And actually that's a good plug for the, the SCI standard at the Green Software Foundation because, uh, CCF does a really good job at giving you your holistic view of all your usage and emissions, which a lot of companies is only going to grow as they scale. Also using this alongside the SCI could be helpful to see more of the rate of carbon emissions.

Chris Adams: [00:33:00] Okay, so this is one thing that I think is interesting that really caught my eye, because when I was initially looking at Cloud Carbon Footprint, there was this idea that you can tag certain services, so you can say, here's my team, or there's a particular there's maybe a particular digital service I make available to people. Presumably you could track that, and you could say, "over this week, the SCI has been this much, which is the Software Carbon Intensity. And then I want to improve that by X percent," and you could set that as a target for the next month, and so on. That's essentially what you would be able to do. Is that correct?

Cameron Casher: Yeah. So we did implement tagging, which was a really crucial feature for us in a lot of ways to help with this whole idea of GreenOps and just understanding how you can do different breakdowns for teams or resources. And actually Arik was a really pivotal developer for the tagging. So I might let him speak a little bit about,

Chris Adams: Yeah, please do. Yeah.

Arik Smith: Yeah, for sure. So yeah, so tagging [00:34:00] basically allowed for us to display the same tags that you would use within your AWS or Google Cloud or Azure Resources, but also expose them on the resources that we were estimating within CCF. And it's great because not only does does it allow you to filter at a more custom level when you're using the CCF API, if you only want to see

resources tagged with a specific value, but it's also great for when you're trying to see aggregated estimates for a custom grouping of resources. So Cam mentioned whether this may be at a team level, or a sub organization level, or a project level, or however you wish to organize it. So, it has been great in getting a grasp in a much more custom level of where you stand within your organization and what your big contributors are that go beyond just the account and service level.

Chris Adams: No, that's actually really interesting. So, what I think it sounds like you're saying is, with tagging like this, you could basically say in a given [00:35:00] month, I know that all the billing for this particular service has been this much. And I know I've done maybe 100, 000 or 10 million requests. Then basically, because the software carbon intensity is essentially, it's the number of things you've done, divided by the emissions, or the other way around basically. That sounds like you could plausibly get SCI ratings for almost any service very quickly that way, across an entire project, basically. I didn't really, I didn't really think of it that way, but that, that, that would be right. If you just have a bunch of things tagged, you know how much usage you have, like, how many people have used this, or how many requests have you served? That will be enough to put together some calculations for a rate like that that you could track over time, right?

Arik Smith: Yeah, absolutely. I think it also opens a lot of possibilities for the ways that you can use CCF. So it's something that I forgot to mention on our roadmap. We're trying to continue to expand upon right now, a lot of those features are available at the API level, which just so happens to be the most [00:36:00] popular way people interact with CCF.

But we're also trying to leverage the dashboard to be able to view a breakdown of your tagged resources in a much more custom way and be able to filter through data through there as well. But absolutely, yeah, it opened up a door to where the world is your oyster in terms of how you choose to bring your estimates or certain groupings into your overall footprint.

Chris Adams: Okay, so I'm glad we had this conversation, because the next thing I want to ask is about community involvement, because when you're running an open source project, there's, there's a, there's a challenge about working out, do you use a mailing list? How do you actually get feedback from people? Let's say we just had this conversation about, okay, I want to have automatic SCI readings for every single thing that comes through, like, where would I ask?

Is there like a Slack channel? Is there a mailing list? Or is there a GitHub discussions board or something? Maybe I could ask one of you about where I would ask something like this to have this conversation, because I'll be honest, I might look at some of this over winter, if nothing else, over the winter break, [00:37:00] because I'd, that didn't occur to me until we just had this conversation now.

Arik Smith: Yeah, absolutely. It's been a learning experience for us. Um, ThoughtWorks has had a few open source projects previously, but at least for us personally, we've never been maintainers, so we've definitely still have been trying to figure out that cadence of what is our preferred communication method? What do people prefer?

And with this project being targeted not only to the software engineer that's curious about their own team's carbon footprint, but also IT execs that are can actively make decisions and utilize CCF to provide a lot of information behind those decisions. We have to be flexible. So we started and currently still use a simple Google group, which is on our website that you can join and become a community member of.

And we get lots of emails that way, either asking direct questions or troubleshooting information from our team or just the community at large, which has been [00:38:00] great because sometimes people may chime in and share their experiences or give their feedback. Of course, since our project is on GitHub, we leverage a lot of GitHub issues and the typical cadence that you would find within the open source repository there.

So people usually raise new issues for bug reports or features, and we've also recently enabled the GitHub Discussions board for our repository to allow for further discussions, especially around feedback or general questions to hopefully try to lessen the load on our email group a bit and keep it closer to our code since we've been seeing a lot of technical questions and bug reports and troubleshootings coming through there and more recently we've been trying to experiment with a Slack channel to get some of those conversations going at least a little bit more seamlessly because one of the main things we've been troubleshooting and learning from is the way that we interact with collaborators.

A lot of times when [00:39:00] other organizations or companies are standing up CCF within their own organization, they often want to get back to the tool or they may find a bug or something to improve and may open up pull requests and a lot of that conversations have been through the email group or GitHub at large, but for instance, that Azure API migration that we're working on is actually being collaborated with some engineers from Resync that Cam met during his time in Berlin.

So we've opened up a Slack channel to hopefully make some of that collaboration and communication and questions easier. Before it's been ad-hoc, "okay, we'll join your Slack or we'll join your, your Teams account or maybe we can do a simple Google chat," but hopefully to centralize and encourage a lot of those communications and collaborations going forward.

Chris Adams: Ah, cool. So you said one thing that was quite interesting there, about that it's not centri It's, this gives me the impression that it's, that Cloud Carbon Footprint is almost like yes, there's obviously some work from ThoughtWorks, and some [00:40:00] contribution there, but it exists as its own project, and I think when I'm looking up now If I go to GitHub, it's its own organization, so there's like a, there's the implication there that this would be like a community project that, in the long run, would have other organizations contributing and maintaining it, because I didn't know about Resync actually contributing in that way.

That's really neat.

Arik Smith: Yeah, absolutely. That's the stance we've always taken with CCF. I know we mention ThoughtWorks a lot, and that's why we're trying to pivot the language to ThoughtWorks just being the primary sponsor of the tool.

Because at the end of the day, they have invested a lot. Within Cam and I's team and the sustainability solutions team at large to put in a lot of the day to day work within the tool, but everything we spoke about from that initial methodology and building on top of Etsy Cloud Jewels, like there were conversations with Etsy actually being had to get Feedback on the methodology, we're coming up in the okay to move forward that way.

Uh, we've collaborated with cloud providers [00:41:00] themselves to get feedback on the way we're doing things and to see if our estimates make sense. And yeah, even with other organizations on our website, we have a list of innovation partners, which really don't even cover everyone we've worked with that have contributed to the project in some way.

And that's why even on GitHub, it's organized within, at least all the, all of the CCF related repositories are organized within the Cloud Carbon Footprint Organization. Because at the end of the day, it is a community supported and collaborative tool. And I think that's the biggest and strongest part of all is that this isn't a methodology that one organization has owned or came up with, but that the, I want to say the entire industry who really cares about this subject has contributed and promoted growth within.

Chris Adams: okay, so like an open place where there's some consensus to actually figure out, "okay, this is how you measure this stuff." All right, wow.

Alright, we're coming up to time now, so I just want to make sure, are there any things that you folks would like me [00:42:00] to draw attention to, or are there any questions I haven't asked yet that you'd like me to ask or you want to talk about before we come to the end of this?

Cameron Casher: I'll just say that I just want to thank you for letting us speak to CCF. Um, If there's anything that's become more apparent to me recently, it's been the impact that CCF has had in the community and in this domain. And I know we talked a bit about this, but just stressing that we want to hear more from the community.

We want to understand the people using it. So really feel free to reach out to us in any of the ways that Arik just explained, Google or GitHub. And. Yeah, we'd love to talk more and understand about how you're using CCF and one of the things we didn't really get into today was just how CCF can really be like the starting point for a lot of companies because just understanding where you're at in measuring is a first phase of even this Green Ops idea where you get into [00:43:00] understanding, measuring, and then the final act of reducing your carbon footprint. So, we'd like to think that CCF really helps enable that act of reducing, and I know the Green Software Foundation has a lot of great material around where to start, especially around the cloud with the green software pattern.

So, using CCF to have sort of a perspective and baseline of where you think you can start to tweak and make some changes is really a cool and important way to understand how different people are mitigating their carbon footprint in the cloud.

Chris Adams: Brilliant, thank you for that Cam. And to Arik, I realize that I should have asked this at the very beginning, but if someone wants to find out about Cloud Carbon for the project, is there a domain name, is there a website, what would you, what would they type into their favorite search engine or browser?

Arik Smith: Yeah, absolutely. Usually, if you Google Cloud Carbon Footprint, we're appreciatively [00:44:00] one of the first, if not the first, to pop up. But, yeah, you can definitely find us at cloudcarbonfootprint.org. Um, it contains our website, our main documentation, and a breakdown of our methodology. There's also a live demo there, if you don't want to download the tool but want to get familiar with what the dashboard is and the capabilities of it, um, and also links to our GitHubs and some of the community groups like the Google groups that we mentioned is available there as well. Otherwise, like Cam mentioned, we're pretty open, so if you still have a question or want to get involved in some way or even have feedback, which we welcome a lot, feel free to hit us up on LinkedIn or shoot us an email.

Maybe we'll provide a link or something and, or any preferred channel that you can find us on.

Chris Adams: Brilliant, thank you for that. Okay then, and maybe we'll just wrap up there, but I feel like there's maybe one thing that it's really worth emphasizing. If you're using tools like Cloud Carbon Footprint, please do tell the maintainers that they're using them. [00:45:00] Because usually you only ever hear from people when they're unhappy with your product or project rather than when they are using it. And it does make it easier to feel better about your life choices. So that was the last thing I might share with you, uh, because it's something that we actually experience ourselves with CO2.js as well. But folks, I really enjoyed learning about cloud carbon footprint with you here. And, uh, I'm looking forward to some of the cool new things that come up from there.

Once again, thanks again for your time. And Cam, enjoy your skiing. And Arik, enjoy adventures with Link, alright?

Arik Smith: Will do. Thanks a lot, Chris.

Cameron Casher: Thank you, Chris.

Chris Adams: Thanks guys, see you around. 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 [00:46:00] Green Software Foundation, please visit greensoftware.foundation. That's greensoftware.foundation in any browser. Thanks again and see you in the next episode.