Why Green Coding is a Powerful Catalyst for Sustainability Initiatives
The principles of coding have evolved tremendously over the past two decades. Initially restricted by bandwidth and limited processing power, developers had to be mindful of the length and complexity of their code. However, technological advancements have allowed for greater innovation, often at the cost of increased energy consumption and higher global electricity demand. In this blog post, we’ll explore how green coding helps organisations prioritise sustainability and reach their energy reduction goals.
What is Green Coding?
Green coding is an environmentally sustainable computing practice that seeks to minimise the energy required to process lines of code, thereby reducing overall energy consumption. This practice supports organisations in achieving their greenhouse emission reduction goals, which have become increasingly important in response to the climate change crisis and global regulations.
Green coding is a segment of green computing, which aims to limit technology’s environmental impact. This includes reducing the carbon footprint in high-intensity operations such as manufacturing lines, data centres, and even the day-to-day operations of business teams. The broader green computing umbrella also encompasses green software—applications built using green coding practices.
The High Energy Consumption of Computing
To fully understand how green coding can reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, it’s essential to examine the energy consumption of software:
- Infrastructure: The physical hardware, networks, and other elements of an IT infrastructure all require energy to run. Inefficiencies in these areas can lead to excessive energy use.
- Processing: Software consumes energy as it runs. The more complicated the software or larger the file, the more processing time and energy it requires.
- DevOps: Developers write lines of code that are parsed and processed through devices, which consume energy. More code to process means higher energy consumption and carbon emissions.
Recent research into the speed and energy use of different programming languages found that C was the most efficient in terms of speed, reducing energy and memory usage and providing another potential opportunity for energy savings.
Green coding begins with principles similar to those used in traditional coding.
Writing More Sustainable Software
Green coding begins with principles similar to those used in traditional coding. Developers can adopt less energy-intensive coding practices to reduce the amount of energy needed to process code:
- Lean Coding: Focus on using the minimal amount of processing needed to deliver a final application. For example, website developers can reduce file sizes, which accelerates website load times and improves user experience.
- Reduce Code Bloat: Avoid unnecessarily long or slow code. Open-source code can contribute to software bloat because it often contains redundant code that uses additional processing power.
By adopting lean coding practices, developers can design code that uses minimal processing while still delivering desired results.
Implementing Green Coding
The principles of green coding are designed to complement existing IT sustainability standards and practices. Implementing green coding requires both structural and cultural changes:
Structural Changes
- Improving Energy Use at the Core: Multi-core processor-based applications can increase energy efficiency by directly instructing processors to shut down and restart within microseconds.
- Efficiency in IT: Optimising IT infrastructure through modern tools like virtual machines (VMs) and containers can reduce the number of physical servers needed for operations, thereby reducing energy consumption and carbon intensity.
- Microservices: Building applications with microservices breaks down complicated software into smaller elements called services. These smaller services are called upon only when needed, making applications run more efficiently.
- Cloud-based DevOps: Applications running on distributed cloud infrastructure can reduce the amount of data transported over the network and the network’s overall energy use.
Cultural Changes
- Empower Management and Employees: Encourage adoption with consistent messaging to the entire DevOps team. Support the sustainability agenda and make people feel like they are part of the solution.
- Encourage Innovation: DevOps teams often seek to innovate and solve big problems. Encourage teams to find new ways to use data insights, collaborate with partners, and take advantage of energy-saving opportunities.
- Stay Focused on Outcomes: Anticipate challenges and deal with problems that arise more easily by staying focused on outcomes.
Benefits of Green Coding
Beyond energy-saving benefits, green coding practices offer additional advantages:
- Reduced Energy Costs: Using less energy means spending less. Reducing energy consumption not only benefits the environment but also helps maintain business sustainability.
- Accelerated Progress Toward Sustainability Goals: Green coding helps organisations move closer to achieving net-zero emission goals and other strategic initiatives to increase sustainability.
- Higher Earnings: CEOs that implement sustainability and digital transformation initiatives, such as green coding, report higher average operating margins than their peers.
- Better Development Discipline: Green coding empowers programmers to simplify elaborate infrastructures, potentially saving time and reducing the amount of code software engineers write.
Green Coding and Innobles
To find out more about Innobles and green coding, start with the white paper from the Institute for Business Value, “IT Sustainability Beyond the Data Center.”
This white paper investigates how software developers can play a pivotal role in promoting responsible computing and green IT, discusses four major sources of emissions from IT infrastructure, and looks at how to fulfil the promise of green IT with hybrid cloud.
Infrastructure optimisation is an important way to reduce your carbon footprint through better resource utilisation. One of the fastest ways to impact energy efficiency is to configure resources automatically to reduce energy waste and carbon emissions. Innobles Turbonomic Application Resource Management is an Innobles software platform that can automate critical actions to proactively deliver the most efficient use of compute, storage, and network resources to your apps at every layer of the stack continuously—in real-time—without risking application performance.
When applications consume only what they need to perform, you can increase utilisation, reduce energy costs and carbon emissions, and achieve continuously efficient operations. Customers today are seeing up to 70% reduction in growth spend avoidance by leveraging Innobles’ green Coto better understand application demand. Read the latest Forrester TEI study and learn how IT can impact your organisation’s commitment to a sustainable IT operation while assuring application performance.
Green coding offers a significant opportunity for developers, sustainability enthusiasts, and environmental activists to contribute meaningfully to environmental sustainability and business success. By adopting green coding practices, organisations can achieve their sustainability goals, reduce energy costs, and enhance overall operational efficiency.
