Want To Create Software Sustainably? Anne Currie’s Got Ideas
Anne Currie is one of the foremost experts on how we can reduce the environmental cost of our industry, having been passionate about sustainable tech for many years. She is part of the leadership team at the Green Software Foundation and co-author of “Building Green Software,” O’Reilly’s new book on what the tech industry must do to handle the energy transition.
Currie has 30 years’ experience as an engineer, senior manager and startup founder, and has been speaking and writing about sustainable systems since 2006. She is a co-founder of Strategically Green, a coaching and consulting firm driving green tech, and is the author of the Panopticon series of science fiction novels.
In this episode of The New Stack Makers, Currie talked to me, Charles Humble, about the practical steps we software developers can take to build resilient, futureproof systems.
Why Energy Proportionality Matters
Our conversation started with a discussion on the dearth of good material on this subject, and how writing “Building Green Software” compared with writing science fiction (which Currie also does).
“How the tech industry needs to adapt to renewable energy is a really complicated subject, full of misinformation and very multidisciplinary,” she said. “So writing the book was a heck of a lot of work, involving loads of research.”
We then explored the differences between climate and weather, and between climate change and global warming. We also discussed the importance of energy proportionality — the observation that the more we use a computer, the more efficient it becomes at converting electricity to practical computing operations.
Energy proportionality helps explain why Currie thinks the route to net zero data center emissions is aligned with modern DevOps practices that reduce both cost and carbon while increasing speed of delivery and security.
Significant benefits come from architecting systems to run on renewable power. One of my favorite chapters in “Building Green Software” is on networking, which draws parallels between how we kept the internet going during the pandemic, as well as ideas around resilience in a broader sense.
Currie suggested that the transition of electricity from fossil fuels to renewables “is going to mean that customers are exposed to the variable availability of power on the grid, in the same way that the tech industry is always being exposed to variable availability of bandwidth from the internet, because the internet is completely decentralized, not command and control.”
One example she provided is video conferencing applications, which she was involved with developing in the early days.
“A video conferencing system monitor has to monitor available bandwidth and change its behavior,” she said. “It prioritizes audio because that’s usually the most important bit, but video quality steps down. There are things like freezing your background or using cat filters, which can be written to use a lot less bandwidth without anybody really noticing, in order to handle the fact that bandwidth is fluctuating and that the internet is not a resilient system.”
Watch the full episode to learn more, including why Currie thinks that focusing on scores such as power usage effectiveness (or PUE) can lead to greenwashing, and why “energy proportionality” is badly named.
