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Building Green Software Part 1: Introduction • Anne Currie

• Anne Currie & GOTO • Season 3 • Episode 30

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This interview was recorded for the GOTO Book Club.
gotopia.tech/bookclub

Read the full transcription of the interview here

Anne Currie -  Co-Author of "Building Green Software", Leadership Team at Green Software Foundation & Veteran Software Engineer

RESOURCES
www.oreilly.com/library/view/building-green-software/9781098150617
greensoftware.foundation

Anne
www.annecurrie.com
@anne_e_currie

DESCRIPTION
How will software development and operations have to change to meet the sustainability and green needs of the planet? And what does that imply for development organizations? In this eye-opening book, sustainable software advocates Anne Currie, Sarah Hsu, and Sara Bergman provide a unique overview of this topic—discussing everything from the likely evolution of national grids to the effect those changes will have on the day-to-day lives of developers.

Ideal for everyone from new developers to CTOs, Building Green Software tackles the challenges involved and shows you how to build, host, and operate code in a way that's not only better for the planet, but also cheaper and relatively low-risk for your business. Most hyperscale public cloud providers have already committed to net-zero IT operations by 2030. This book shows you how to get on board.

You'll explore:
• How the energy transition is likely to change hosting on prem and in the cloud—and how your company can prepare
• The fundamental architectural principles of sustainable software development and how to apply them
• How to determine which parts of your system need to change
• The concept of extending hardware longevity and the part that software plays

* Book description: © Manning

RECOMMENDED BOOKS
Ioannis Kolaxis • 101 Green Software
Mehdi Khosrow-Pour • Green Computing Strategies for Competitive Advantage and Business Sustainability
Lässig, Kersting & Morik • Computational Sustainability
Zbigniew H. Gontar • Smart Grid Analytics for Sustainability and Urbanization
Katsoni & Segarra-Oña • Smart Tourism as a Driver for Culture and Sustainability

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Collaborative efforts to cover various aspects of sustainability in software

Hello, my name is Anne Currie. And I am a veteran software engineer. I've been in the tech industry for nearly 30 years now working on a variety of different things from really hard, you know, hardcore C-server stuff in the '90s through to modern operations stuff now. And I'm also part of the leadership team of the Green Software Foundation, which is a new Linux Foundation devoted to how we can basically manage the energy transition from our side, from the tech side. How we can contribute, how we can work in that new environment. But today, I'm here to talk to you because I am one of the co-authors of the new O'Reilly book, "Building Green Software." There are three of us, all of whom are key folk in the Green Software Foundation, who are working on that book. And hopefully, it will be a kind of a nice easy-to-read introduction to code efficiency, operational efficiency, carbon awareness, time shifting, how everything fits together to get with the green software transition. The transition for fossil-fueled energy, which is massively on demand, you can get it whenever you want, to renewable energy, which is not so readily available. So, the book is a very broad introduction. It won't be deep diving in. If you want a whole book on a particular subject, I'm sure O'Reilly will start to produce those, but given that we're already getting a lot of positive feedback on the book that we've done.

The book officially comes out in first course of next year, early next year. But what is actually happening, and this is the O'Reilly way of doing things now, which I appreciate. As we write each chapter, they do a bit of minimal editing and then it goes straight up on the O'Reilly Safari site. So, if you have an O'Reilly Safari subscription, you can start reading the chapters, and there's one coming every month. And the one that is available already is the introduction. And there was quite a lot of method to our deciding we were going to go live with the introduction first.

Powering the Future of Software with Renewable Energy Solutions

The introduction is basically a summary of everything we're gonna say. It's kind of a nice introduction to what are all the key concepts. What do you need to do, what do you need to be thinking about? Hopefully, it should be a nice easy read. We're already getting quite a lot of reads on it, so that's good. It's looking like a lot of people want to know how we need to be accommodating this new world of power is not necessarily gonna be available, well, power will not be available instantly everywhere. Now, eventually, it will. The whole point of an energy transition is eventually you have transitioned.

At some points, we are back in the state where we are now, where power is very readily available. It's free, you just don't need to think about it. But maybe for the next couple of decades, that's not gonna be the case because the thing about a gas-fired power station or even a coal-fired power station is they're quite reliable. They provide great baseline power. You just turn them on and you've got, you know, literally at the flick of a switch, you have energy available, but renewables are not like that. And we've got several problems with the way the renewables work. I mean, obviously, they're extremely cheap when they are running. So, when the sun shines, the wind's blowing, there's tons of power. We have everything we might possibly want and need to use. But when the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn't shining or it's night for example, then things get a little bit more hairy.


Long-term solutions for a sustainable energy infrastructure

For the next few years, we are gonna have to cope with all that kind of stuff. And then we've got a couple of tools in our toolbox, which is what we talk about in the introduction. We've got to be more efficient with power and be more aware. So, being aware of what the carbon intensity of the grid is at any moment, and shifting what you are doing, so that you run more when the sun is shining, whatever, and you run less when it isn't.

In the long run, we will have solutions. We will have batteries, and we will have great grids that can transfer power from the other side of the world where the sun is shining. But we're quite a long way off that. That's gonna take quite some time. So, we need to be thinking about how things work in the meantime. And at the moment we're not necessarily paying much more for power that's dirty versus power that's clean. But I think we all know that that situation isn't going to continue forever. So, there's a kind of FinOps element to this as well that it will cost, ideally, probably a punishing amount if you have an all-on-demand, always-on application that's very energy heavy and is running when the only thing to available to power it is a coal-fired power station. So, we have an enormous amount of ability to shift things around in the tech industry and we're very clever. So, we really do need to be leading the field on this. So, this book is all about all of these different concepts. All the different ways, all the different ideas, all the different things that folk are coming up with.


Meet Anne’s co-authors – Sara Bergman and Sarah Hsu

With my co-authors, we've got the three of us. There's me, there's Sara Bergman, who's based in Norway, Swedish based in Norway, and works for Microsoft. And we've got Sarah Hsu who is Taiwanese but lives in London. Works as an SRE for Goldman Sachs. So, we're trying to approach this from all different angles, make sure we've got lots of different perspectives in this. We're going out, we're talking to people all over the place. Our forward will be written by Adrian Cockcroft, lately of AWS sustainability. So, we're trying to make sure that we get a lot of points of view.

And O'Reilly have come up with this clever scheme, which apparently they do all the time, but I hadn't really heard about it before, where you release chapters as you go. And we are using that to try and get people to give us feedback on what they want to see, and what isn't in the book at the moment. So, we're very keen to get folks to read those chapters. Say introduction with the first chapter. The second chapter will be "Measurement." The lead on that chapter is Sara Bergman. So, I think next time we'll probably have her coming in to talk about that. We were under some time pressure with Sara because she's heavily pregnant, and is due to have a baby in six weeks' time. So, we have to push her stuff, get her stuff out, and get her talking about it before she has to go on maternity leave. And then after that, we'll get Sarah Hsu in to talk about her chapter. She's going to own the "Carbon Efficiency" chapter. So, I hope that gives you some kind of an idea about what's coming in the book, and what we want from you, which is feedback. We want ideas, we want you to ask all the questions that you want answered, so we can make sure we do answer them. Because we've got the time, we can incorporate what you say as we go along. So, it's a community project. We need your feedback, we need your questions. And hopefully, we'll get them.