Exploring Green Software: Sustainability in IT and DevOps – Asim Hussain, Green Software Foundation

This is Techstrong tv. Hi everyone. I'm Bonnie Schneider, your sustainability contributor to techstrong tv.

Today, I'm pleased to welcome Asim Hussain, the chairman of the Green Software Foundation, an organization committed to building an ecosystem devoted to sustainable software development. Asim has over two decades of experience having worked with the European Space Agency, Google, and Microsoft, and now at Intel, where he serves as the director of Green Software. Asim, it is so great to have you here.

Thank you so much from having me here, Bonnie. Well, can you tell me even more about your background, um, and how it all led you to the commitment to green software development? Sure, yeah, of course.

So, as you said, like I've got a long history in developing software. Um, I've always been, you know, in part, interested in sustainability in the environment. Um, I remember it was quite a funny story actually.

My son was born five years ago, and, uh, we decided to, um, we decided to use cloth nappies and we decided to kind of really, you know, really really dive into this, dive into this world. And I remember those of you who, those of you audience who haven't dealt with cloth na cloth nappies, know that you have to lot, you have a lot to deal with when you're dealing with cloth nappies. Yeah.

And I just remember one moment, um, having this epiphany when I realized just how much I was willing to deal with poop on a daily basis. And yet I had never once in my entire career, despite how much I cared about sustainability, despite in my entire career, asked the question, what can I do in my job to make software more sustainable? And that's when I really started on this journey about five years ago, started reaching out, found out there's actually a, at the time, a much, much smaller community of people, of engineers who really starting to ask themselves the same question.

And, uh, and yeah, I joined at the, originally I joined a community called Climate Action Tech. Um, I eventually became an organizer of that community. It grew.

I then, um, was at Microsoft at the time. I tried to, um, build some of this kind of, uh, green software paradigms into, into how we did our job. And then eventually an opportunity came to be something called the Green Cloud Advocacy Lead, uh, Microsoft.

And really starting to help Microsoft's customers understand how can you actually build software that's more sustainable? And the Microsoft platform did a whole bunch of stuff, like, created a lot of training, created something called the Eight Principles of Green Software. A lot of material, a lot of thought leadership.

I always advise people these days, if there's one thing you should do is write and like just create content and put it out there. Um, and then about two years ago, through all that content creation and, and kind of thought leadership and just really, you know, getting some content out there, um, several other organizations reached out. Accenture and ThoughtWorks especially reached out and said, you know what?

We're, we're looking at the same world. We're we're asking ourselves the same questions. Let's collaborate.

We put our minds together and realized, you know, the best vehicle for collaboration that it can be is kind of a, a nonprofit entity where we can all sit around a table and kind of push this field forward. And that's when the Green Software Foundation was created about two years ago. And then, well, I can talk for ages, but I'll break there.

And that's kind of what we're, what we're focusing on in, on all of these days. You know, it's interesting that it's only been two years. It, cuz it just seems like it's just getting more and more, um, people joining and, and talking about it.

Um, so how do you, what, what do you attribute that momentum to? That's a really good question. And, and I, and I'm not a hundred percent sure because I've seen the momentum as well, and it was definitely, um, for a couple of years I was just talking, I felt almost to the void.

Uh, there wasn't really a lot going on. I did notice, um, it was almost, uh, immediately around the same week of the, um, Biden coming into power into the us. Um, there was, I, I believe I got reached out by these two organizations within a week of that happening.

Interesting. So I almost felt like interesting there was a permission given to start focusing on sustainability at that, at that moment in time. So that was definitely something there, uh, that triggered that.

But also I would say the, um, the level of kind of average, uh, uh, knowledge and the cultural knowledge of sustainability just increasing to the point, um, where that's also created that momentum as well. One of the things that I love, uh, that someone said to me once and, and sh it was someone who had a particularly tough time around Covid and she said to me, this has been one of my hardest years of my life, but one of the most positive things that I've done is engaging in green software and, and really trying to, I could finally do something good with my work. So I think that knowledge has kind of spread as well, and people just want to do more, um, focused work and just really, you know, work is where you spend eight hours of your day or nine hours of your 10 hours of your day.

That is where people want to make that work more purposeful and more meaningful. And I think that's kind of another driver of it as well. Great explanation.

Um, let's talk about the principles of Green software engineering. Our, our audience. They're all IT practitioners.

They're probably wondering, okay, I'm really interested in this. Can you explain what the principles are? Yeah, so there was originally the, the, the eight principles of green software, which were, we, uh, launched, uh, quite a few years ago.

And in fact that's actually now morphed a little bit into, uh, we don't, we don't really even call 'em the, the, the principles anymore, but there's basically what we say is there's three things that can make software green. There's one kind of core thing that you should think about. And that, and that core thing has like three things.

I'll just say what they are now. Mm-hmm. Um, so the first thing is, you know, to be, uh, to be green means what we call to be carbon efficient.

Everything we do emits carbon into the atmosphere. Me talking to you right now is emitting carbon into the atmosphere. The application we're using to record this is emitting carbon into the atmosphere.

So your goal is to make sure that for each kind of piece of value that your application provides, you just emit the least amount of carbon as possible. And it's called this idea called carbon efficiency, which might sound, um, quite simple and the best ideas are quite simple. But, you know, three or four years ago, this was something that needs to be discussed heavily and agreed upon.

But we say there's basically three ways to make software carbon efficient, and one is energy efficient. Most electricity still created with the burning of fossil fuels. Um, and so just by consuming less energy, you are going to emit fewer emissions into the atmosphere.

The second one is what we call hardware efficiency. So like every physical device in the world, my mobile phone, every physical device in the world, mobile phone serves everything. You emit carbon on its creation.

We emit carbon when it gets responsibly, uh, con destroyed again. Um, and that's called in the embodied carbon. And so, you know, as well as kind of using fewer, less electricity, you also wanna use in the, well, in the cloud space, it would be fewer servers.

Um, one of the, the, the, the statistics about the cloud space is that, um, the on-premise are not the hyperscalers like, uh, uh, Microsoft and Google and, and, and Amazon, but like the more on-premise data centers, most servers are hovering around 10% utilization. So most servers are sitting idle, and that's just a waste. Mm-hmm.

Um, so that it, it's making those servers kind of increase utilization on the, on the device space. Like in mobile phones, um, people are tend to throw these away more because the software, you need to stop working on it rather than the device broke. And that's called software driven obsolescence.

So the, how you make this more hardware efficient is just making your sure your software runs on all the devices and doesn't, you're not forcing people to upgrade every, every two years. And the last one is a really interesting one called carbon Aware Carbon awareness or carbon Aware computing, which is, uh, you're going to be consuming electricity anyway, so can you make your consumption of electricity more intelligent? And it's can you make your applications do more when the electricity is, is coming from cleaner sources like, uh, wind and, uh, uh, solar and do less when they're coming from dirtier sources like coal and gas.

And can you make your applications demand and, and, and, and shape themselves in, in, in, in different ways. A really interesting example of this is actually Microsoft's, uh, my old company, um, did some great work in this space. Um, so Windows became carbon aware.

So Windows 11, uh, does updates now only when the electricity is cleaner. And also Xbox has now released some stuff as well. So they're going to be implementing the carbon if they have implemented it or they are going to be implementing.

But Xbox updates are now, uh, going to be the same, like carbon aware. They're gonna try and make those happen, uh, when the electricity is cleaner as well. So yeah, those are the three.

That's interesting. Yeah. I didn't know that.

Yeah. Um, for the Green Software Foundation, um, you know, I was reading it that you talk a lot about the trusted ecosystem for green software. Can you explain what that is?

Yeah. So like couple of years ago, there's a lot of interest in this space, but if you are like an enterprise organization and you are looking out in the ecosystem and you are saying, what, what's, what tooling should we use? What open source software should we use?

What standards should we use? And you are not seeing something that, um, you, you, you're perhaps seeing some tool that's that's maintained by an amazing tool that's maintained by somebody in their spare time on the weekends. If you're an enterprise organization, you are not going to trust that product no matter how good it is to use in as part of your layer.

What you want is you want to see an entity that is there, that is funded, that has the people that can maintain it, that can deal with bug requests and and, and those kinds of things. So that's kind of what we talked about. We talked about building a trusted ecosystem is, is when we come out with the standard, it, it was a standard created through consensus of like dozens of organizations, you can trust this.

It wasn't just something that a couple of organizations got together and released. It was a, it was a a lot of effort. When we have a tool that you can use, it's something that is again, being, it has, like we, we have funding, we have budget, we can make sure it's not going to disappear in 2, 3, 4 years time.

It's something you can trust. And that's kind of one of the one, it was one of the, the bottlenecks that organizations had to really start exploring the space. They wanted to start leveraging standards and tooling.

They just were a bit nervous about leveraging certain projects because they weren't sure if it was gonna be around. So when they're right, when they're looking for, um, enterprise, uh, software, is that, do you find that the green software foundation's a source for that of who can we trust or how, how does that work? Yeah, and I think, I mean, I think there's multiple organizations out there now actually, which is what's so exciting is that, you know, the, the landscape as you mentioned earlier on, is changing so much.

And even in just a few years, I mean, now there's like multiple organizations, large organizations, large foundations who are, who are now championing this work. And, and, and you are, we're all together kind of creating this trusted ecosystem. We have a couple of things that we build.

So one of the main things that we've been, uh, pushing over the years, and it's about to lit. I don't know when this is gonna come out, but, uh, today or tomorrow we're hopefully fingers crossed, gonna be in iso, uh, standard, we'll call it the software Carbon intensity specification, which is a way of measuring software, um, for, for, for, for carbon emissions. And it's been built by people who actually, it's been written and, and and discussed for two years by people who actually spend their days doing this work.

It's built by the people who do it. It's not really been, uh, uh, driven by, by peop outside that kind of bubble, like regulators or something else, people who do that job. And it's so exciting.

It's getting a lot of adoption, a lot of interest. That's, that's, uh, our main standard that we're developing. And we are coming out, it's coming out to ISO soon.

Other tooling we have as what you, I mentioned carbon awareness earlier on, we actually have something called carbon error SD sdk, like a software library, because if you're wanna build carbon aware features into application, everybody's gonna use the same library. And what we said is, let's make that library, um, and let's, uh, let's, let's make it available to everybody. Uh, UBS and Microsoft did an amazing piece of work with it originally, and now it's being used by, you know, several dozen organizations to, to build kind of carbonite features into their products.

Is the iso, um, that you were talking about, is that gonna be a new area? Um, that that does like a standard? Is that what you mean that people would recognize?

Yeah. Cause I assume that there was something with sustainability, but it wasn't particularly about green software. Yeah.

Uh, from our, from ours or from another organization. I think it was another organization I was just reading. Yeah, yeah.

I think another one you might talking about, there's like another one that created kind of a quite a, a wide, uh, a document that kind of wide pointed you towards kind of like 50 other standards you should be looking at if you want to implement in the organization. Ours is like very, very specific to software. So what, what we recognized early, early on is that, um, you know, and, and we're big supporters of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol and, and, and what it's achieved and how it's used by organizations and, and we're big supporters of it, but one of the challenges with it is, is it's, is it's been designed and built for a manufacturing industry mm-hmm.

For people who like physically build a product and then sell a product. Software is just so different. It's like, um, like I used to speak to the Windows team and like when Microsoft calculated its carbon emissions, the Windows component was just Microsoft employees who use Windows.

Mm-hmm. Well, windows is used on 10 billion devices in the entire world. Amazon would Microsoft, the, the Windows would be factored into Amazon's carbon emissions for its employees.

So it's kind of broken up, but the Windows team would love a measure to say, well, we're used on 10 billion devices. I want one number for us to measure all of our impact so that if I make a change, I can see the impact of that change in this big number. Not just Microsoft slice of it, but everybody slice of it.

And that's kind of one of the examples. That's exciting. Yeah.

So that's kind of, we needed a way for, so software breaks, organizational boundaries, and it just, that's what's so beautiful about software as well. Mm-hmm. And that's, um, that's what the s e is one of the, one of the aspects of s e is that you can finally have a score just for, for software re regardless of who's using it.

That's great. I'm, I'm looking forward to seeing that. Um, let's talk about some strategies for energy efficient cloud computing.

What, what would you recommend? So the, the very first step in, in, in that realm, and this is why this is where the, the, the cloud is kind of a challenging space. If you were to mention to me, like energy efficient, like laptop or, or desktop or something like that, especially devices, there's actually a much clearer path for what, where to go there because, because these devices are driven by batteries and there's already a pressure to make them not consume all the battery power, it means there's already lots of tooling, lots of measurement, lots of ways for engineers to actually measure the impact, measure the energy consumption of their devices.

The big challenge with the cloud, um, and with a lot of the space is measurement. Um, I could sit here and I ha I used to in the early years of this thing, just sit and write, uh, you should, you should do X, Y, and Z. You should do X, Y, and Z in the cloud.

It will reduce your energy consumption. But the feedback I constantly got back from people was, that's great, but until I can measure the impact of that, no one's going to prioritize this work. I'm not gonna get the money, I'm not gonna get the investment.

So that's kind of where I would always say, if you're looking to build more energy efficient software in the cloud, your absolutely first point of call has got to be to start measuring the energy, which unfortunately is very challenging right now still. Um, I recommend looking at projects at the green, uh, software foundation called Impact Engine, which we're looking at, which is gonna help you kind of look at some of this stuff. There's also, there's projects from several other people as well, which is really trying to solve that measurement problem.

It's, it's a big challenge. You first have to kind of take an inventory of your application, you have to see, well, what are my different components? Am I gonna factor in the networking and am I gonna include a database?

What am I gonna include? What am I not going to include? Then you wanna measure it.

And then once you've measured that baseline, then you know, you can, there's quite a few patterns that you can employ to actually reduce the energy consumption. And it's different sector by sector. So for instance, machine learning has quite a different catalog of things which you should be trying to do in order to make your machine learning run, uh, more carbon efficient machine learning or topic of the day.

Uh, one of the is is a really good, uh, use case for carbon where computing, for instance, because you can move, you can move the machine learning computation to a place or a time when the electricity is cleaner. And the machine, the way, the way machine learning kind of, you know, is flexible with that, makes it a really good use case to reduce its emission through carbon away computing. Whereas like we, we've got like a real time meeting happening right now.

We couldn't suddenly move this to a different part of the world. So you have to have employ different solutions there. Well, you may have touched on some of these, but our audience, um, work in the DevOps and IT field.

Um, is there anything else that you'd like to talk about in terms of how they can incorporate sustainability in their workflows? Yeah, so when it comes to, um, uh, I'm gonna be a broken record to be honest with you, and I'm just gonna say it could, because it all just starts with measurements. I would mostly say you have to figure out how to bring the measurement into your field.

If we're talking DevOps, where we want to get to is, as you are, as you are looking to ship code out to production, which is kind of one of the aspects of DevOps, I, I would look at, excuse me. Um, I would encourage them to start measuring the impact of every change. And then, um, together with SREs or however your organization is structured, um, you know, start alerting, start saying, well, that, that code change is amazing.

It looks, it looks, it looks interesting, but we've noticed it actually increases electricity consumption by, by, by 4%. Is that tradeoff? Did you expect that?

Did you know that, is that a tradeoff you're comfortable with? If not, okay, let's go back, let's go back to the drawing world. Let's see where that, let's see where that, that, that, that impact came from.

That's where I see DevOps as almost the, um, DevOps and SRE as almost the gatekeepers to, to this changes just the same ways with, with, you know, um, uh, uh, not sustainable, um, making sure bugs don't get out into production. You wanna make sure less sustainable code isn't going to go out to production. So that's kind of where I see that, that they're all fitting in there.

Do you find that there's a growing interest, um, from people that work in DevOps in, in green software and being more sustainable? Absolutely. There's even like, um, I've even got a bet on with people as to what this, uh, title of this, uh, role will be.

Some people think it's gonna be green ops. I hear that term sometimes. Yeah.

Some people have used the word, uh, uh, dev sus, ops dev, sustainability ops. I know there's another one I can't, I can't remember as well, but there's like a couple of little, little bows out. I, I suspect Green Ops is probably the one that's gonna win.

It's got more, you know, you think It's gonna be like the title of the whole movement behind it or what, what The title? I think so. I think, so when I say about Green Ops, I'm talking about the, the, the subset of people in DevOps who are really looking at this question and how I've just described it, which is how can we operationally run our infrastructure in a way which reduces its emissions?

Um, and that obviously is a continuous, it's not like a stand one-off thing. It's a continuous, like, let's look at everything all the time and continuously try and optimize. But again, you have to measure, because if you're not gonna be able to measure your emissions, um, you're not gonna be able to, to, you're not even gonna know when you're doing things right or when you're doing things wrong.

In fact, I have like three, I have like, um, this thing, I hope eight principles, three patterns, like four, I have to think of four msms, which I'm, I'm starting to talk about right now, which I think are very important. I can maybe, uh, leave your audience with, which is, um, green software. The, the future of green software is gonna be around the four s.

The first is modeling. You need to be able to model what is your application, what is an application anyway, like, it's such an ephemeral idea. You have to like say like, what is an application?

What are the components of it? The second one is measuring. You have to be able to measure all the different components so you actually know where your baseline is.

The third M is is quite contrived, but it, it works simulate. So you gotta simulate and then you can start asking questions like, well, what if I made it carbon aware? What would happen?

What if I moved part of my computer to France instead of where it is right now? What would happen? Um, so that's to simulate.

And the last one is, I think where, where DevOps necessary really focus in on is called monitoring. I really fundamentally, truly believe that the future of sustainability, be it tech or beyond, is all about real-time measurement of emissions. Imagine if an organi, if every piece of software in the world reported its carbon emissions every five minutes.

Wow. Imagine if an organization reported its carbon emissions every five minutes instead of once a year. What behavior would that change?

I think that would empower the entire workforce, cuz you could see the impact of your change straight away. 01%. You feel empowered, you know it's worked and the investment continues into your area.

That's where I, I firmly believe That's a great idea, I think. And I think by conscious it could also sh you know, wake someone up like, wow, I didn't realize it was that much. I better make some changes.

So that's a, that's a great point. Um, do you feel that, uh, since you're, you're in the EU and I'm in the us it, it seems like a lot of the people I've been talking to are very focused on, uh, green software, more so in the EU than here. Um, is that because of the regulations that the governments are, are putting down?

I know there's gonna be more regulations coming, 2024. Uh, can you just talk a little bit about that? Yeah, I think it's, I think it is because of perhaps like, um, I can't speak culturally.

I think that definitely there is, there is that divide. Um, I I would say the EU generally is being, uh, b because the nature of the eu, it means it can kind of imp impose laws upon its member countries and it's kind of quite a large block. And so it has a, so it's not just like the uk I mean the uk it's not the UK makes a lot just the uk the EU makes a lot.

It is expansive, right? So, you know, one of the biggest blocks and so one of the interesting things about kind of when the EU does, um, so it's got the carbon, I think about the carbon, I forgot what it's called now. The carbon report.

Um, It's an acronym. I can't think of it. Yeah, yeah.

Well now much lots of organizations, uh, from next year are now going to have to, uh, uh, rep must report their carbon emissions and, and carbon risks. Um, that won't just be because of this, you're such a big market, it will force the global organizations. Everybody's going to have to do that.

If you want access the EU market, you're going to have to do this. So they almost use that as like a battering ram. They know they're such a big market.

They know that if they just impose a law here, everybody else will have to, um, adhere to that law. That's one of them. Yeah, No, I was just gonna say, and I think a lot of that's coming into play now and in 2024.

Yeah, in 2024. And also earlier on saying like, I think the, the, you know, it was, it was the, the France is also a country I've noticed has a culturally a lot of effort and investment investment into, into green software. I speak to a lot of people from France or into this space.

I was scratching my head for quite a while figuring out how come every single company that's reaching out to me is from France and I realize Paris, I think it is the Paris Pyramid agreement. I think that because the makes sense. One of the major milestone agreements here was in Paris.

I think that culturally impacted France. And then I think that is maybe one, they're one of the biggest players in the EU block and maybe that's driving some of the, some of this work as well. Asm, I I know our time was, I've gone over, but I just, I I just enjoyed talking to you so much.

It's so fascinating. You're just a resource of, of wonderful information and I really encourage everyone to go to your website. Would you mind just telling your website again?

The Green Software Foundation? foundation. Okay, Great.

People should check it out. It's, it's a great resource. Well, thank you Asim Hussain, the chairman of the Green Software Foundation.

It was just wonderful to have you on Techstrong tv. I hope you'll come on again. Would love to.

Thank you so much. Thank you. Have a great day.

All right, well stay with us. We're gonna have a lot more news coming up.