devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Tag: sustainability

  • How Platform Engineering Can Drive Digital Sobriety

    How Platform Engineering Can Drive Digital Sobriety

    If we’re being honest, the “green issue” currently isn’t the priority it needs to be for a lot of companies. At best, they are ticking the box marked ‘sustainability’ and paying lip service to a trendy topic. At worst, they are engaging in nothing more than greenwashing.

    Considering carbon emissions from cloud computing have now overtaken those from commercial aviation, this is disheartening for the IT sector. Unsurprisingly, most of these emissions come from inefficient use of the cloud due to overly complex processes and a lack of centralized oversight over cloud infrastructures. And if “emissions” sounds a bit vague, here’s a translation into dollars–$147 billion was wasted in 2022 in cloud spend.

    So, when it comes to reducing an organization’s cloud carbon footprint, there is clearly a financial incentive. Even for those who don’t believe in individual responsibility or worse, simply don’t care what kind of world we’ll leave future (and some present) humans to live in, there is money to be saved.

    The truth is that companies need to put sustainability first across the whole enterprise, and they need to do it now.

    A New Kind of Business

    Tackling departments one-by-one or singling out individual processes to make them more sustainable is not going to work. What organizations need is to stop thinking of sustainability as an afterthought and start incorporating it in the decision-making process from the get-go, maybe even as part of their very business model.

    This is the sort of business that places its people and the planet above profits. Progressive, modern companies that want to stay in business longer need to invest in their people and take care of the planet instead of chasing endless growth and ever-increasing profit because that, simply put, cannot last.

    As a culture, we’re currently at a turning point–late-stage capitalism is running its course, and more people are realizing that constant growth at the expense of well-being and the planet’s dwindling resources is not sustainable (in all senses of the word).

    For this to work, it’s about looking at business through a new prism.

    Driving Digital Sustainability From the Ground Up

    It’s not too late for businesses to become more sustainable. In fact, it is the best time to make life-saving changes. When it comes to tech specifically, there are a couple of things you can do, starting with two key things that need to change.

    First, cloud waste has been costing companies billions of dollars for years now. Organizations are set to spend nearly $600 billion on the cloud in 2023, but it seems that most people are still in the dark about the real environmental impact of cloud usage. As with most big corporate changes, it’s all about a change of mindset. We need to accelerate awareness and promote digital sobriety to inspire transformation and decision-making with GreenOps on the enterprise level.

    A cloud-first approach has long been the holy grail of IT. However, what we couldn’t anticipate is the sheer volume of resource usage and complexity that comes with it. We simply do not have the planetary resources to support this growth much longer. It’s time to become smarter, leaner and more environmentally conscious by using the “consume better” approach.

    Second, think about the KPIs. Change without success parameters will not work. While organizations have a key role in decreasing global cloud spend, they must have the right tools and references. They need to be able to assess the environmental impact of their digital choices at all decision levels.

    For the IT sector, this is where platform engineering comes into play. An internal developer platform can act as the critical piece that connects DevX, deployments, governance, security and observability.

    With green best practices and cloud carbon footprint visibility at every stage–from the dev deploying a new environment on the cloud to the CFO checking the monthly cloud bill–a platform engineering approach ensures not only organizational but also individual responsibility. When all tools are accessible and processes transparent, nothing gets lost in translation. This means less room for error and cloud waste.

    Ultimately, it’s About Consuming Better and Consuming Less

    Right now, these KPIs will be financially motivated, and rightly so. But there will come a time when progressive organizations will put their environmental impact at the forefront of their mission statement.

    The B-Corp certification, which evaluates companies in terms of their social and environmental performance, grew 63% in 2022. This shows the trend toward moving to a more inclusive and sustainable economy. Partly because it’s in the interest of the businesses’ long-term success and reducing costs, but partly because it is simply the right thing to do.

  • EU Adopts European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS): What are the implications for Tech and IT?

    EU Adopts European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS): What are the implications for Tech and IT?

    The European Commission’s recent announcement on July 31st marks a major turning point for sustainability reporting in the European Union. The adoption of the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS) is set to reshape how companies report their sustainability practices and impacts. This new directive will have far-reaching implications, especially for tech and IT companies that play a significant role in the region’s economic landscape.

    Expanding Reporting Requirements

    With the implementation of the Corporate Sustainable Reporting Directive (CSRD), the ESRS is poised to significantly expand the number of companies required to disclose sustainability information. While around 12,000 companies currently report under the Non-Financial Reporting Directive (NFRD), the ESRS will extend this requirement to cover over 50,000 organizations. The standards cover the full range of environmental, social, and governance issues, including climate change, biodiversity, and human rights. They provide information for investors to understand the sustainability impact of the companies in which they invest.

    European Parliament

    Sustainability Reporting Solutions: The Rising Demand

    Tech companies specializing in sustainability reporting solutions are expected to witness a surge in demand. As companies gear up to comply with the ESRS, they will be on the lookout for innovative software capable of compiling, analyzing, and presenting sustainability data in a clear and understandable format. The ESRS’s emphasis on integrating financial and non-financial data will also drive demand for integrated reporting platforms. Tech companies with expertise in financial software may look to expand their product offerings to include sustainability data, providing a comprehensive, all-in-one solution for businesses seeking streamlined reporting processes. This integrated approach aligns with the EU’s vision of cohesive and transparent corporate reporting. The European Commission points to “ample evidence that the sustainability information that companies currently report is not sufficient. They often omit information that investors and other stakeholders think is important. Reported information can be hard to compare from company to company, and users of the information, such as investors, are often unsure whether they can trust it.”

    Timeline and Implementation

    The ESRS delegated act adopted by the Commission will be formally transmitted in the second half of August to the European Parliament and the Council for scrutiny. The scrutiny period runs for two months, extendable by a further two months. The European Parliament or the Council may reject the delegated act, but they may not amend it.

    Companies will have to start reporting under ESRS according to the following timetable:

    • 2024: Large Listed Companies, Banks, and Insurance Undertakings with More Than 500 Employees
    • 2025: Other Large Companies, Including Non-EU Listed Companies
    • 2026: Listed SMEs (with the option to opt-out for two additional years)
    • 2028: Non-EU Companies Generating Over EUR 150 Million in the EU (with separate standards)

    Showcasing Expertise and Driving Change

    Engaging with IT practitioners and company stakeholders through webinars, podcasts,  on-camera interviews, and featured articles,  tech companies can leverage thought leadership to drive positive change in efforts to meet EU sustainability reporting initiatives. Providing expert insight and thoughtful perspective,  tech executives can shape the discourse around sustainability reporting.  As a leading platform exploring the intersection between sustainability and tech, thought leadership platform EcoTech Insights emphasizes the significance of educating the market about ESRS and its impact. By embracing innovation and transparency, tech and IT companies can set a high standard for the industry, inspiring others to follow suit and contribute to a more sustainable and transparent business ecosystem.

    Embracing the New Era

    The adoption of the ESRS brings forth a new era in sustainability reporting for the EU. As businesses adapt to meet the new requirements, tech, and IT companies have an unprecedented opportunity to lead the way, offering transformative solutions that drive sustainability and corporate transparency.

     

  • The Heat is On: Climate Change, Record-Breaking Temperatures and the Tech Industry’s Response

    The Heat is On: Climate Change, Record-Breaking Temperatures and the Tech Industry’s Response

    The Heat is On: Climate Change, Record-Breaking Temperatures and the Tech Industry’s Response

     

    July’s Sizzling Start 

     

     

    The Fourth of July 2023 was not just a day of fireworks and barbecues but also the hottest day on Earth in as many as 125,000 years. The global average temperature reached 17.18 degrees Celsius (62.92 degrees Fahrenheit), breaking the record set just the day before. According to preliminary data from the ERA5 dataset produced by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), the global average 2m temperature reached 16.88°C on Monday, breaking the previous record of 16.80°C from August 2016. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports that these record-breaking temperatures are a clear sign of escalating climate change. This intense heat poses a significant challenge to our digital infrastructure, particularly data centers, the nerve centers of our digital world.

    Data Centers: The Heat Test

    The resilience of data centers was put to the test in the summer of 2022. Intense heatwaves across California and the European Union strained these facilities. According to the BBC, over 50% of the UK’s oldest active weather stations recorded their hottest day ever in 2022, based on Met Office data. In the U.S., Los Angeles sweltered under a record-breaking 44.5°C (112°F). CNN reported that last September, Twitter experienced the loss of its Sacramento (SMF) data center region due to extreme heat. In London, record summer heat forced Google and Oracle into outages when cooling systems failed at data centers. The culprit was the critical temperature threshold of 27°C (80.6°F), at which point servers automatically shut down to prevent irreversible hardware damage.

    Data centers house numerous servers that generate significant amounts of heat during operation. These servers rely on proper cooling mechanisms to maintain optimal performance and prevent overheating. The critical temperature threshold serves as a safety mechanism to protect the integrity and functionality of the servers. Today’s servers, reports Nautilus Data Technologies, contain the hottest processors and GPUs in history and are producing more than 1kW of heat per rack unit — or more than 40kW per rack. Many data centers simply cannot produce enough chilled air to keep those servers from overheating.

    Exceeding the critical temperature threshold can lead to issues like reduced performance, data corruption and even permanent damage to the hardware components. By shutting down the servers when temperatures rise too high, data center operators can mitigate the risk of such detrimental consequences.

    Tech Innovations: Rising to the Challenge

    To counter these escalating challenges, the tech industry is driving forward with innovative solutions. For instance, in 2023, LiquidStack, a pioneer in cooling solutions, unveiled its new immersion cooling technology. This system submerges server components in a non-conductive fluid that carries away heat 1,200 times more effectively than air, offering a promising solution to heatwave-induced outages.

    Data Center Frontier reported that at the Open Compute Summit, Meta, the social media giant formerly known as Facebook, outlined a roadmap for a gradual shift to a water-cooled infrastructure, using cold plates to provide direct-to-chip cooling for AI workloads.

    A third promising innovation comes from Submer, who introduced a next-generation immersion cooling system in 2023. Their technology uses a proprietary dielectric fluid to cool server components directly, reducing the need for traditional air conditioning systems and making data centers significantly more energy-efficient.

    As we continue to grapple with the increasing severity of climate change, it’s clear that the resilience of our digital infrastructures hinges on our ability to innovate and adapt. The tech industry is leading the charge, and while the journey is challenging, these emerging solutions offer a beacon of hope. The urgency to develop and implement such solutions is underscored by the IPCC’s predictions for more frequent and severe heatwaves, highlighting the crucial interplay between climate change and our digital world.

     

    Join the Conversation at Ecotech Insights

    At Ecotech Insights, we bring together top thought leaders from various industries to discuss the intersection of sustainability and climate change. Techstrong Group’s Sustainability Contributor, Bonnie Schneider, hosts engaging conversations that explore innovative solutions and strategies to address environmental challenges.

    Are you a visionary in the field of sustainability or climate change? We invite you to be featured on our show and share your expertise, insights and initiatives with our global audience. This is an exceptional opportunity to inspire others, spark meaningful discussions and drive positive change.

    Is your organization passionate about supporting environmental initiatives? Consider sponsoring Ecotech Insights and showcase your commitment to a sustainable future. By partnering with us, you’ll gain visibility among our audience of forward-thinking individuals and organizations while contributing to the advancement of eco-conscious solutions.

    Fill out the contact form below to learn more! 🌍

  • How Platform Engineering Protects Profit, People and our Planet

    How Platform Engineering Protects Profit, People and our Planet

    Platform engineering is emerging as a way of evolving DevOps, with 94% of respondents to the recent State of DevOps report agreeing that the practice helps their organization to reap the benefits of DevOps. The business arguments for platform engineering are clear: In that same report, respondents stated that platform engineering improves efficiency (59%), speeds up delivery time (58%) and improves workflow and process standards (57%).

    But in addition to the huge benefits organizations are now realizing in terms of business value, platform engineering is also pretty crucial for a business’s long-term viability. And by that, I mean that platform engineering can be inherently sustainable.

    How Can Platform Engineering Be Sustainable?

    First, it’s important to note that ‘sustainability’ here doesn’t just mean ‘green.’ Rather, sustainability means that an organization is able to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs, too. These are needs that come in three different varieties: People, planet and profits.

    This means that to be truly sustainable, platform engineering needs to deliver lasting and stable returns on things like return on investment year-over-year, improved awareness of and reduction in an organization’s carbon footprint and better governance and optimization through monitoring and analytics.

    Any approach which supports business growth while simultaneously empowering employees and being kind to the planet is the dream for pretty much every organization. But how exactly can departments and wider organizations unlock all of these benefits? The answer is: There’s no magic bullet.

    Sustainable platform engineering is about treating your platform as an iterative cycle: It isn’t the actual creation of the tool that matters, as much as it is the maintenance, upkeep and usability of the platform as your business moves forward. This, naturally, will take time, effort and money—all of which, it’s safe to say in the current climate, are in short supply. But it is crucial that businesses act strategically, looking for areas for improvement and paths that will all add up to a more sustainable business in the long term.

    The Three Paths to Success

    These paths can be divided into three main areas of focus, and the first is GitOps or infrastructure-as-code (IaC).

    A tweak that every organization should start making is using Git as a single source of truth for deployments, enabling developers to work faster by empowering them to use their own code without hands-on involvement from ops teams. This could be combined with optimized infrastructure, moving toward IaC to enable faster and more efficient deployments.

    These principles form the foundation of sustainable platform engineering as they protect profits, allowing the business to keep moving forward and investing in the other areas crucial for a sustainable operation. Combining IaC with GitOps ensures speed and simplicity while maintaining a high-quality end product.

    Creating an optimized infrastructure is important, but just as important is empowering employees to feel good about the work that they are doing. That’s why implementing a self-service tool alongside an optimized UX is the second area of focus. This removes the pressure on those in the tech department to be infrastructure experts while erasing the need for endless tickets to be raised for issues.

    By freeing up DevOps engineers and platform experts to spend more time doing what organizations need them to do, businesses can keep innovating to maintain an edge over their competitors. Self-service capabilities combined with an accessible UX are a useful combination for a much-improved developer experience (DevX).

    Finally, it’s important to keep in mind that self-service isn’t just going to benefit end-users; it also has major upsides for improved governance, as well as keeping control of cloud spending and carbon footprint impact. Optimizing and iterating your platform engineering tool means that a business can keep up with the fast pace of the global tech market while also continuing to implement the latest tweaks and upgrades. It all adds up and builds on the organization’s platform engineering solution.

    Reaping the Rewards of Sustainability

    If an organization follows the above three paths, it is well on its way to a more sustainable business powered by platform engineering. By focusing on targeted, achievable projects to build a solid foundation, organizations can achieve big benefits for people, the planet and profit.

    From an economic perspective, sustainable platform engineering ensures legacy infrastructure is modernized, silos are broken down and production is accelerated, all ensuring the business doesn’t risk lagging behind competitors. A stable and secure return on investment is key to sustainability in the medium to long term, and sustainable platform engineering ensures a business is able to weather future challenges and keep a healthy profit margin.

    As we all know, underpinning any great business is the people who work there. Techs get stressed by having to interact with infrastructure they know nothing about, DevOps and specialists get stressed when those techs desperately raise tickets in an attempt to get help, and platform engineers get stressed when the weight of providing a solution to these problems rests squarely on their shoulders. Implementing a UX-strong self-service portal relieves the pressure, allowing employees to focus on delivering real value to the business through innovation. A better DevX ultimately leads to better business outcomes.

    And, of course, it’s ultimately no good having a successful business if the planet we all share continues to suffer from the effects of the climate emergency. Just like a business that hemorrhages money is unsustainable, so is a planet that wastes its finite resources. By getting control of cloud usage and controlling cloud climate impact, businesses will not only be empowering their people and improving their bottom line, but they will also be making a tangible difference to our shared environment, supporting our planet as it recovers from years of climate neglect.

    Platform engineering offers lots of tangible benefits for businesses, but sustainable platform engineering can be even better, not just for a business, but employees and our shared environment. It might just be time to upgrade DevOps and start thinking about building a sustainable organization that supports profit, people and the planet.

     

  • Technological Breakthroughs in Hurricane Forecasting

    Technological Breakthroughs in Hurricane Forecasting

    The 2023 Atlantic hurricane season marks a transformative era in tropical forecasting, driven by the remarkable progress in machine learning and big data analysis. It’s a rapidly evolving field, where technology and meteorology intersect to better prepare the public for the formidable forces of Mother Nature.

    NOAA’s 2023 Atlantic Hurricane Season Forecast

    The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) projects that this year’s Atlantic hurricane season will produce 12 to 17 named storms, with five to nine major (Category 3+) hurricanes. NOAA expresses 70% confidence in these ranges, bolstered by its evolving technology.

    Leveraging Technological Innovations for Advanced Hurricane Forecasting and Resilience
    A summary infographic showing hurricane season probability and numbers of named storms predicted from NOAA’s 2023 Atlantic Hurricane Season Outlook. (Image credit: NOAA)

    Upcoming Upgrades: Supercomputing System Expansion

    The recent implementation of the Probabilistic Storm Surge model improves storm surge forecasting for the U.S. mainland, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The model provides forecasters with a range of potential flooding scenarios, enhancing community preparedness. 

    NOAA plans to implement several more upgrades this summer, including a 20% expansion of its operational supercomputing system’s capacity. This enhancement will enable NOAA to run more complex forecast models, leading to more accurate predictions.

    In late June, the Hurricane Analysis and Forecast System (HAFS) becomes operational. Running in tandem with the current Hurricane Weather Research and Forecast Model System, HAFS is projected to show a 10-15% improvement in track forecasts over existing models.

    HAFS represents a significant leap forward in the integration of machine learning algorithms and sophisticated data analysis techniques. By leveraging state-of-the-art computational models and assimilating an extensive array of meteorological data, HAFS has the potential to unlock new insights into the behavior and trajectory of tropical cyclones. This fusion of technology and meteorology is projected to surpass the capabilities of existing models.

    Harnessing Machine Learning for Advanced Forecasting

    The core strength of HAFS lies in its ability to process vast amounts of atmospheric and oceanic data, utilizing advanced machine learning algorithms to identify patterns and correlations. These algorithms can discern intricate relationships between various meteorological variables, such as sea surface temperatures, atmospheric pressure, and wind patterns, enabling more precise forecasting. By comprehensively analyzing historical storm data and incorporating real-time observations, HAFS can generate forecasts with higher accuracy and longer lead times.

    HAFS also harnesses the power of high-performance computing, allowing for faster and more complex simulations. This computational prowess enables the system to simulate a multitude of possible scenarios, accounting for various atmospheric conditions and factors that influence hurricane behavior. The ability to run multiple simulations and generate ensemble forecasts enhances the robustness of predictions and provides forecasters with a comprehensive range of possibilities.

    Innovative Technologies: Drones, Saildrones, Underwater Gliders, and Sounding Balloons

    Innovative technologies like small aircraft drone systems, additional Saildrones, underwater gliders, and WindBorne global sounding balloons will contribute to advancing knowledge and improving hurricane forecast accuracy. 

    Small aircraft drone systems offer a unique vantage point for data collection in the lower atmosphere, enabling meteorologists to gather critical information on temperature, humidity, wind patterns, and other atmospheric variables. These drones are equipped with advanced sensors and instruments, allowing them to navigate through hurricane environments and provide valuable real-time data that can significantly improve forecast models.

    Saildrones, alternatively, are autonomous surface vehicles equipped with an array of meteorological and oceanographic sensors. They harness wind and solar energy for propulsion, enabling them to traverse vast oceanic regions and collect crucial data on sea surface temperatures, ocean currents, and other parameters relevant to hurricane formation and intensification. By expanding the fleet of Saildrones, scientists can enhance their observational capabilities and obtain a more comprehensive understanding of the complex interactions between the ocean and the atmosphere during hurricane events.

    Underwater gliders, equipped with sensors and instruments, offer a unique perspective beneath the ocean’s surface. These autonomous vehicles can collect data on temperature, salinity, and ocean currents, providing valuable insights into the oceanic conditions that influence hurricane development and intensity. By combining data from underwater gliders with other observational platforms, scientists can gain a more holistic understanding of the underlying processes that fuel tropical cyclones.

    WindBorne global sounding balloons ascend to the upper levels of the atmosphere, collecting data on temperature, humidity, and wind patterns. This information is vital for initializing and validating numerical models used in hurricane forecasting, enhancing the accuracy of predictions.

    Leveraging Technological Innovations for Advanced Hurricane Forecasting and Resilience
    NOAA GOES satellite captures Hurricane Ian as it made landfall on the barrier island of Cayo Costa in southwest Florida on September 28, 2022.

    Improving El Niño & La Niña Forecasts

    The Tropical Atmosphere Ocean buoy array is undergoing modernization and upgrades, bolstering the accuracy of El Niño and La Niña forecasts. These climate patterns have significant impacts on hurricane activity, and accurate predictions of their behavior are crucial for understanding the overall climate system. 

    By modernizing and enhancing the buoy array, scientists can gather more precise data on oceanic and atmospheric conditions associated with El Niño and La Niña, leading to more accurate long-range hurricane forecasts.

    New tools and upgrades have also been introduced for more precise hurricane analysis and forecasting. The National Hurricane Center has expanded its Tropical Weather Outlook graphic forecast range to seven days from five. To give communities more time to prepare, the Weather Prediction Center has also extended the Excessive Rainfall Outlook by two days.

    Leveraging Technological Innovations for Advanced Hurricane Forecasting and Resilience
    A summary graphic showing an alphabetical list of the 2023 Atlantic tropical cyclone names as selected by the World Meteorological Organization. The official start of the Atlantic hurricane season is June 1 and runs through November 30. (Image credit: NOAA)

    Bolstering Resilience Against Future Hurricanes

    The integration of these innovative technologies and the modernization of existing observational systems expands observational capabilities both in the atmosphere and the ocean to track and monitor storms. The evolution of forecasting techniques holds promise for even greater resilience against future hurricanes, showcasing the remarkable impact of technological advancements in safeguarding coastal communities.

  • Device42 Brings Power and Carbon Emission Tracking to IT Asset Management

    Device42 Brings Power and Carbon Emission Tracking to IT Asset Management

    Device42 today made available a power and CO2 Summary Dashboard to its agentless platform that employs machine learning algorithms to discover and track IT assets.

    Raj Jalan, Device42 CEO, said the dashboard makes it possible for IT teams to combine the tracking of assets and associated dependencies with a capability that enables them to reduce power consumption costs and levels of carbon emissions.

    It’s not clear yet how carbon emission tracking will be integrating into IT management frameworks, but as sustainability becomes a more pressing issue, it’s only a matter of time before IT teams will be required to monitor power consumption and associated carbon emissions more closely, said Jalan.

    The Device42 dashboard simplifies that task by identifying carbon emissions by location, business unit, vendor or application. Armed with that data, it then becomes possible to consolidate servers and applications or move workloads to more efficient platforms, added Jalan.

    Arguably, the biggest challenge when it comes to managing IT infrastructure is the number of organizations that are still using spreadsheets to do so. The Device42 approach to discovery and assessment uses the application programming interfaces (APIs) exposed by cloud services providers and IT vendors. Once mapped, it then becomes possible for IT teams to use a search function to uncover, for example, dependencies between multiple services.

    In theory, it should be possible for DevOps teams to also programmatically implement policies based on the Device 42 data to move workloads in way that reduce IT infrastructure costs. Over the years, many organizations have lost track of how workloads have been deployed in, for example, cloud computing environments—only to discover a surprise expense at the end of the month.

    In fact, one of the hottest segments of IT these days is the emergence of financial operations (FinOps) as a discipline to control cloud computing costs. Fundamentally, FinOps is the discipline that promotes a shared responsibility for an organization’s cloud computing infrastructure and costs. Rather than having disparate procurement teams working in silos to identify and approve costs, business, financial and IT leaders establish policies and best practices for usage that are programmatically enforced.

    It’s still early days as far as the adoption of FinOps is concerned, but adding that capability first requires a deep appreciation for what IT assets are being used to run which workloads. From there, it then becomes possible to not only optimize usage but also reduce both electricity costs and carbon emissions.

    Of course, the tracking of carbon emissions right now is a bigger issue in Europe and elsewhere than it is in the U.S. However, a global framework for trading carbon credits is now impacting IT teams as organizations look to minimize their carbon footprints. Sustainability has become an economic issue.

    In the meantime, DevOps teams should expect that soon, power consumption and carbon emissions will be added to the list of metrics they are measured on.

  • How Platform Engineering Makes Software Sustainable

    How Platform Engineering Makes Software Sustainable

    The world is constantly becoming more and more aware of the importance of sustainability in every aspect of our daily lives from buying groceries to traveling, and the IT world is no exception. Indeed, sustainability is already gaining importance in software development. For example, in the latest version of Thoughtworks’ Technology Radar, “carbon efficiency as an architectural characteristic” is one of the new techniques of interest. Moreover, in its research “Predicts 2023: Environmental Sustainability Is Now an IT Sourcing Imperative,” Gartner states that “by 2026, 75% of organizations will increase business with IT vendors that have demonstrable sustainability goals and timelines, and will seek to replace vendors that do not.”

    This shows that there is a growing need for sustainability. How is the software development industry responding to this need? Many great initiatives are arising, but platform engineering, in particular, helps make software more sustainable.

    What is Platform Engineering?

    According to Gartner’s definition, platform engineering is “the discipline of building and operating self-service internal developer platforms (IDPs) for software delivery and life cycle management.” This trend has gained momentum in the last few years, and an increasing number of organizations are adopting internal developer platforms (IDPs) to scale their development process. IDPs allow developers to self-service the technology they need, whether it is infrastructure, runtime resources or ready-to-use services. This helps speed up the development process and ensures higher-quality software.

    Platform engineering is becoming more and more popular and foundational. According to Gartner, “by 2026, 80% of software engineering organizations will establish platform teams as internal providers of reusable services, components and tools for application delivery.” Therefore, given the expected widespread adoption of IDPs in the next few years, sustainability emerges as a requirement. Ignoring or underestimating the importance of sustainability may cause organizations to waste all the benefits ensured by an internal developer platform.

    Platform Engineering for Economically Sustainable Software

    To survive and operate properly in the market, a company has to be economically sustainable and therefore stable. Usually, software is an asset that contributes to revenue generation for the company, but it still has maintenance costs. To make software economically sustainable, the total cost of ownership (TCO) needs to be lower than the generated income.

    An internal developer platform can lower software product costs, making them more sustainable. How so? In a nutshell, by sharing resources that can serve multiple products and can be reused across multiple projects. Such resources include, but are not limited to, capabilities, processes, infrastructure, configuration, etc. Since the platform at scale manages shared capabilities, there product teams won’t waste time and effort replicating it every time. While lowering the TCO, this characteristic of platforms also contributes to reducing the software’s time to market.

    Moreover, platform costs are shared across the whole organization and are not part of the TCO of each software product. This helps software to be more sustainable from an economic point of view.

    Platform Engineering for Environmentally Sustainable Software

    When talking about sustainability, most people usually think about the environment. While respecting the environment is one of the most important factors, it is important to note that sustainability is not limited to this aspect.

    An internal developer platform can help software be more sustainable on two levels.

    • Observability: The platform should collect and easily expose metrics on the environmental impact of the software. Such metrics can include hardware resource usage, energy consumption and CO2 footprint.
    • Optimization: The platform should foster the adoption of sustainable patterns, like the ones provided by the Green Software Foundation. It should also include solutions that actively help reduce energy consumption, such as kube-green.

    It is important that both of these capabilities are present and implemented in the platform. Observability without optimization is useless, and optimization without observability cannot be done.

    Platform Engineering for Socially Sustainable Software

    When speaking about sustainability, social responsibility cannot be forgotten. The first social responsibility of each organization is toward its members and employees. Does developer self-service also have social implications? Yes, it does; mainly by improving the developer experience.

    Indeed, an internal developer platform helps organizations’ members to:

    • Reduce friction between teams: Since everyone can have everything they need right when they need it, there will no longer be bottlenecks and misunderstandings between different teams. This contributes to a better working environment where everyone feels welcome and more productive.
    • Decrease repetitive tasks and cognitive load for developers: Since the platform will manage and automate interactions with infrastructure and runtime, developers will no longer need to waste time and energy on such out-of-scope secondary tasks. This way, developers are more focused on their actual job of developing new features and they will feel more satisfied.
    • Enable work from anywhere at anytime: Since the platform can provide all technology and capabilities whenever a developer needs them, it will no longer be required that people work together in the same location and at the same time. In other words, IDPs enable remote and asynchronous ways of working. This allows organizations to offer remote working and to create distributed teams, ensuring a better work-life balance for the team members.

    All of this brings happier employees that will be more productive and satisfied with their work, which will reduce turnover.

    Conclusion

    The need for a more sustainable world is gaining momentum and involves every industry, including software development. No wonder Gartner included sustainable technology in the “Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2023,” along with platform engineering. As platform engineering is being adopted by more and more organizations to accelerate software development, sustainability has to be addressed.

    An internal developer platform can help developers build more sustainable software. Platform engineering can help in all of these aspects, improving not only the developer experience but also the organization and the environment. This is just the beginning of the sustainable path platforms should follow, but the outlook is very encouraging.

  • How Enterprise Software Architects can Design for Sustainability

    How Enterprise Software Architects can Design for Sustainability

    Organizations of all sizes are feeling the pressure to introduce more aggressive sustainability measures to combat climate change. For example, most cloud service providers have announced significant climate pledges to either reduce or offset their carbon emissions. But these initiatives can only go far to move the needle—it’s up to individual companies and departments to participate in curbing their climate impact, and DevOps certainly has a role to play in enacting positive change.

    One way to design for sustainability is to optimize information technology systems to reduce waste. Enterprise IT typically supports a lot of unnecessary technical debt and perpetuates toilsome tasks that contribute to energy inefficiencies. Removing unused instances and features or idle workloads that aren’t contributing value could be an easy way to reduce waste. Yet other optimizations will require more effort.

    I recently chatted with André Christ, co-founder and CEO of LeanIX, to discover what techniques enterprise-level software architects can use to get the most out of their technology modernization efforts while leaving the least carbon footprint. According to Christ, optimizing existing processes, using cloud-native technologies and leveraging value stream management are some tactics architects can take to “do more with less.”

    1. Match Technology to Sustainability Targets

    First, technology leaders must understand the capabilities of their business that could help contribute to meeting sustainability targets. “This requires understanding and systematic mapping,” said Christ. “It’s really about understanding what you can do as a company to contribute to sustainability in a more holistic way.”

    For example, a routing and logistics provider might optimize operations by redesigning its floor plan to maximize efficiency and reduce energy use. Similarly, Christ recommended software professionals take stock of their existing capabilities to determine what should change. This could equate to discovering internal microservices that aid one department and extending them across the entire organization.

    Optimizing data transfers is another way to create a leaner IT system. For example, teams could reduce constant polling by eliminating overfetching and underfetching or embracing a new API standard, like GraphQL, said Christ. Cutting out these superfluous calls reduces unneeded energy consumption.

    2. Ensure Cloud-Architected, Not Lift-and-Shifted

    Cloud migrations can reap significant benefits in terms of scalability and flexibility. But not every cloud migration delivers tangible sustainability benefits. AWS identified six unique strategies for migrating applications into the cloud: Rehosting (known as lift-and-shift), replatforming, repurchasing, refactoring, retiring and retaining. While early gains may be met simply by rehosting applications, replatforming or refactoring them completely with cloud-native components will likely deliver the best optimizations.

    “If you only lift-and-shift applications into the cloud, they will keep running just as inefficiently as a virtual machine,” said Christ. Therefore, architects should design for cloud-native whenever possible rather than simply porting legacy applications to the cloud. On the other hand, it may be prudent to replace specific legacy components with SaaS or retire them altogether. As such, it’s crucial to analyze your existing landscape before making a cloud migration to ensure changes are both cost-effective and advancing sustainability goals.

    3. Practice Value Stream Management

    Practicing value stream management is another potential strategy to cut bloat by ensuring product teams always create more value for the end customer. Planview defined value stream management as such:

    “Value Stream Management is a management technique or practice that focuses on increasing the flow of business value from customer request to customer delivery.”

    This frame of mind could help engineers make more streamlined decisions about what they’re creating. But to achieve value stream management, organizations will require enhanced visibility into how individual services perform, their dependencies under the hood and their approximate emissions.

    The core question you should be asking product teams, said Christ, is how carbon-efficiently are you operating in relation to the number of users you are serving? The answers will highlight which aspects of the business require the most optimization.

    4. Tie Sustainability to the Business Bottom Line

    Many sustainability pledges are founded on carbon offsetting, in which the company purchases “offsets” of its emissions, usually by planting trees or preserving forests. But, the practice of carbon offsetting has received criticism as being ineffective at stemming rising global temperature levels. So what does an honest climate pledge look like that’s more than greenwash? Well, perhaps one more closely associated with the bottom line.

    Taking the idea of value stream management one step further, Christ argued that a real climate pledge would involve reducing carbon footprint by a certain percentage for each new dollar generated. As a business scales and its revenue increases, it should constantly reduce emissions in parallel with this growth. This would equate to assigning a dollar value for every CO2 ton and putting it into the balance sheet, said Christ.

    Doing More With Less

    Nations are striving to reduce carbon emissions through sweeping legislation. Yet, national goals will be insufficient to meet the target decline of 43% percent by 2030 and net zero by 2050, the United Nations reported. Thus, it will take effort from the private sector, as well.

    We’ve identified some steps above to do more with less, yet many current, unsustainable practices are culturally ingrained, making them challenging to change. It will be the work of enterprise software architects to break it down and apply smarter designs to cloud-native applications. This will likely require centralizing views of internal services to enhance visibility and reporting. “You need good visibility into what you’re building and what it’s composed of to reduce the footprint,” said Christ.

  • A Guide to Sustainable Application Modernization

    A Guide to Sustainable Application Modernization

    Sustainable development is a blueprint for societal growth that is applied around the world to balance the needs of the present while optimizing for the future. Sustainability consists of three pillars — economic, environmental and social — that must work together to meet this goal. The complexities of digital transformation and application modernization can benefit from applying a sustainability lens to this challenge that not only includes the technical benefits of cloud computing but, more broadly, the three P’s of sustainability: Profit, people and planet. Application modernization will benefit the business in measurable ways, but can also affect unexpected positive cultural and green initiative benefits.

    Sustainable Application Modernization: What is it?

    Sustainability initiatives have always had to take a holistic approach that combines human, ecological and economic health and vitality. Sustainable application modernization is no different in that business leaders are dealing with finite resources (budget, staff and time) that must be applied now to align with longer-term priorities and their associated consequences. The main goal of application modernization is to transform an enterprise’s monolithic applications into modern architectures that can more fully take advantage of cloud-native services such as containers, microservices, serverless and a range of DevOps methodologies. These technical capabilities lead to a number of high-value cloud benefits including scalability, elasticity and engineering agility. Too many modernization strategies and business plans stop there and this is a mistake. By undervaluing the sustainability benefits that include economic, environmental and people upsides, technology business leaders are not accounting for some of the most important benefits of modernization.

    Breaking down the modernization problem along the three pillars of sustainability helps define sustainable application modernization:

    • Economic sustainability: The business benefits of modernization must account for releasing more features and fixes more frequently, less downtime, lower technical debt and higher rates of innovation.

    • Environmental sustainability: A modern architecture is more resource efficient, scales at a much finer level than a monolith, and is able to take advantage of cloud data centers that offer the “greater efficiency of aggregated compute resources.” These cloud-native architectures enable more intelligent application orchestration and resource allocation usage based on demand, need, cost, seasonality and performance.

    • Social sustainability: Besides the ongoing challenge of recruiting and retaining talent for maintaining a monolith, the resulting development team structure is a direct reflection of the architecture itself and this is most often monolithic, too. A more domain-centric approach using modern technologies creates leaner, more focused team topologies that can also operate effectively in remote work structures.

    The broader benefits and impacts of effective application modernization align directly to metrics associated with elite performers in DevOps research reports that track four key performance categories: Frequency of application deployments, application feature lead time, change failure rates and time to recovery. This long-standing and annual research report from DevOps research and assessment (DORA) metrics also now reaches beyond the business and technical dimensions into the performance, culture, people, burnout and team impacts of these modern best practices.

    Application Modernization is Not Just an IT Problem

    Most application modernization projects never fully get off the ground because technology leaders look at modernization as just an IT problem. The business cases for these projects focus on technical benefits or simple cloud migration and lift-and-shift infrastructure cost improvements. A sustainable application development methodology opens up this calculus to the three dimensions of sustainability: Economic, environmental and social.

    Much as everyone from developing countries to the richest nations in the world view sustainability initiatives along these lines—balancing economic growth, environmental health and the vitality of their citizenship—application modernization projects can be a catalyst to major improvements that drive profit, maximize efficiency while improving company culture, retention and team growth.

    Sustainable Application Modernization: Three Steps to Get Started

    The enthusiasm for application modernization is high, but organizational precendent and a history of failed efforts stop most projects before they get started. These three steps can set you on a sustainable path going forward.

    • Start with a data-driven plan: A monolithic application architecture requires a quantitative understanding of the technical debt you are carrying at an architectural level; the move to a cloud-native architecture unlocks the business, environmental, and cultural benefits discussed above. Thus, it’s critical to assess your application estate from an architectural perspective to calculate the complexity and risk associated with your applications, prioritize which applications to modernize and extract ROI benefits related to the modernization effort.
    • Build a broad coalition across the pillars: A sustainable application modernization plan works across three pillars that span different roles, functions, and initiatives in an organization. This strategy creates both an opportunity and a need to recruit outside the technology team to the business and product owners that can validate and then promote the economic upside. Next, pull in green initiatives and corporate sustainability representation that can quantify and promote the environmental benefits further. Finally, HR, training and project management experts will understand and align with the people-side of modernization to create more agile, happier and efficient teams.
    • Create a continuous modernization culture: This approach is designed to maximize short-term benefits while optimizing for the future. It’s critical to look at this as an ongoing, continuous best practice that becomes ingrained at both a technical and cultural level. Most modernization strategies have resulted in one-off projects that, even if completed, may quickly devolve back to bloated monoliths due to a lack of cultural and organizational commitment to take these practices forward and iterate across all applications in the future.

    Sustainable application modernization methodologies can change the course of application development inside an organization and provide a catalyst toward a thriving future that pushes the technology forward and can maximize the value to the business, environment and company culture.

  • 5 Steps to More Sustainable DevOps

    5 Steps to More Sustainable DevOps

    The rise of remote workforces, cryptocurrencies and super-sized data centers brings to the forefront a concern in tech development that doesn’t get enough attention: The impact of computing and advanced technologies on the environment.

    About six months into the pandemic, people began to notice cleaner air, clearer water and an overall calming effect on the environment in the reduced presence of industry. Memes were created and widely circulated that suggested maybe we were the problem after all.

    That lasted for about six weeks before cabin fever set in, and we became impatient and ready to get back to business as usual.

    In the time between the last quarter of 2020 and the sudden waxing and waning of NFTs, a few timid voices again raised concerns about the impact of super-computing and other technologies on the environment. Those concerns eventually became muffled amidst socioeconomic and political turmoil, fears about inflation, staff shortages and logistical issues surrounding supply chain disruption.

    App development tried to fill some of those gaps and new data centers appeared as we struggled to find our footing again in a post-pandemic world.

    While environmental issues have been a matter of growing concern for decades, the past few years have put a particularly intense focus on the issue, with entire industries growing up around everything from climate-friendly investing to carbon offsets, and more. The environmental impact of technology has become an issue yet unresolved in spite of a growing focus on sustainability.

    Addressing the Elephant in Your Staging Area

    The typical DevOps journey focuses mainly on how app development will impact an organization. Rarely does it address how development impacts the environment.

    In addition to factors like improving time-to-market, reducing human error, debugging and making financial resource management more efficient, part of your DevOps strategy should include ways to reduce your carbon footprint and impact on the planet.

    First, it helps to understand exactly how technology affects the climate and depletes natural resources so you can incorporate sustainable development into your plan in a meaningful way.

    • Carbon emissions: It’s estimated that in 2022, there are already more than 16.5 billion mobile devices in use worldwide. Just one iPhone emits up to 86kg of CO2 over its life cycle, and 80% of that occurs before it even gets into the hands of consumers. This is just the tip of the carbon emissions iceberg, and it will only get worse.
    • Power consumption: All of that carbon comes from somewhere, and taking a look at energy consumption from just one slice of technology provides a glimpse into just how heavily computing contributes to the problem. As of 2020, data centers used about 416 terawatts of energy annually. The Bitcoin network alone consumes more power than all global data centers combined. A single NFT transaction consumes 82 kWh of power and emits 48 kg of CO2.

    Even relatively passive use of technology, like video streaming and remote collaboration, for example, has the potential to consume more power than entire countries. Add up all of the hours of Netflix, Zoom meetings and other remote activities and ponder the implications.

    • Waste: Despite the number of devices in use, very little hardware is recycled. Electronic waste comprises 70% of toxic waste worldwide, and it’s estimated to total 40 million tons annually.
    • Water consumption: You don’t often consider mixing water and electricity, but all of those data centers need to be cooled somehow. Internet usage alone uses 3,000 liters of water per person each year and emits 2,000 kg of CO2.

    Cleaning up Your DevOps Process for the Good of the Climate

    To become part of the solution, it’s important to do more than just invest in green businesses. Here are some steps you can take to clean up your DevOps process and become part of the solution rather than contributing to the problem.

    Identify Areas of Vulnerability

    Software engineering and DevOps are increasingly embracing new territory and emphasizing sustainable engineering. The first step in the right direction is to become aware of how power and resources are consumed during your development cycle.

    Consider:

    • How your power is generated. For example, are you dependent on fossil fuels or more eco-friendly methods?
    • How often are you replacing or recycling hardware and other physical components? This is a goal in waste reduction.
    • How are you cooling data centers and computing equipment? Are your efforts at maintaining optimal temperatures wasting resources?

    Balance the Three Areas of Sustainable DevOps

    In the realm of sustainable engineering, the process can be broken down into three categories: Technical, operational and environmental. The goal is to balance these aspects to monitor and optimize the development process and do the least amount of damage possible.

    Enforce Sustainable Development Practices

    Once you’ve identified areas of risk and set goals for sustainable software engineering, use the results to create and enforce a set of development best practices that better support environmentally responsible design and production. If you need some help or ideas, you can model your own initiatives after these emerging standardization principles.

    Become Part of the Green Tech Community

    In 2021, more than 200 countries signed the Glasgow Climate Pact, solidifying their commitment to reducing their carbon footprint and resultant environmental damage from tech development and use. The conference brought together stakeholders from businesses, government agencies and others to share information and create standards and best practices for sustainable computing and tech development.

    Incorporate Tools That Support Sustainable Development

    Tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are creating tools to help DevOps and IT monitor and measure the environmental impact of everything from cloud computing to app development. Seek out and incorporate these tools into your own set of best practices or work on creating your own solutions.

    Final Thoughts

    Tech development is intended to improve our quality of life and reshape how we conduct business. There’s no reason that intention shouldn’t extend to the world in which we live and engage in commerce.

    The first step toward combating climate change without negatively impacting development is understanding how technology affects our environment. Then, we can make informed decisions that support responsible, sustainable DevOps.