Speaker
Abstract
Wait, zombies? Really? Zombies are servers which aren’t doing useful work. They’re everywhere, costing money, eating electricity, and belching carbon. And they’re useless! So how do we get rid of them? In this talk, Holly will explain how utilization and elasticity relate to sustainability. She will also introduce a range of practical zombie-hunting techniques, including absurdly-simple-automation, LightSwitchOps, and FinOps.
Interview
I’m part of the team that builds Quarkus. My particular focus is ecosystem, so thinking of making sure it’s easy for libraries to integrate with Quarkus. Ecosystem means more than one thing, so as well as the people developing for Quarkus, I’m also looking at the environmental impact of Quarkus. Quarkus has a low machine footprint and competitor-beating throughput, so we’ve been investigating whether that translates to a low carbon footprint (it does!).
There’s a huge amount of waste in the IT industry. Some waste is unavoidable, but so much of it is fixable. It’s not just fixable, it's easily fixable. It’s silly waste that is caused by forgetfulness, bureaucracy or inappropriate priorities. Because our industry has such a big carbon footprint, this waste isn’t something we should be living with.
Anyone who’s involved in provisioning machines or deploying workloads will find the talk interesting. That’s almost all of us, in one way or another. Even if we’re not involved in the ops side, we’re creating containers, making clusters, provisioning cloud test environments … and then forgetting to shut them down. Plus I have zombie pictures, which I reckon makes the appeal almost universal. (I promise the zombies are cute, not Last of Us grim.)
Climate is a big and complex topic, and a lot of us can feel powerless. But we’re really not. For all of us, there are simple things we can do which save our organisations money and reduce our carbon footprint. The best thing is that these aren’t sacrifices – they’re optimisations that carry a whole bunch of benefits.
Last year I heard about “helpful null pointer exceptions” for the first time (new in Java 14), and it made me so happy.
Topics
QCon London 2023 is a three day conference for senior software engineers, architects and team leads. An international program committee of working engineers selects every session. Patterns and practices, not products and pitches.
From the same track
Wednesday 29 March
10:35 Windsor (5th Fl.) Session climate Can Green Software Engineering Solve the Climate Crisis? Sara Bergman Senior Software Engineer @Microsoft Software has a large carbon footprint and impacts our global commitment to keep global warming to no more than 1.5°C – as called for in the Paris Agreement. To reach this goal, emissions need to be reduced by 45% by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050. 11:50 Windsor (5th Fl.) Session climate Why Cloud Zombies Are Destroying the Planet and How You Can Stop Them Holly Cummins Senior Technical Staff Member, Quarkus Team @IBM, Java Champion, Previously Senior Principal Software Engineer, Quarkus @Red Hat Wait, zombies? Really? Zombies are servers which aren’t doing useful work. They’re everywhere, costing money, eating electricity, and belching carbon. And they’re useless! So how do we get rid of them? 13:40 Windsor (5th Fl.) Session cloud Cloud Provider Sustainability, Current Status and Future Directions Adrian Cockcroft Former VP Amazon Sustainability Architecture @Amazon Cloud providers are large, growing rapidly, and leading sustainable development of datacenters, although their total capacity is still a small proportion of the global datacenter footprint. 14:55 Westminster (4th Fl.) Panel Panel: What’s next? Net-Zero Commitments? Holly Cummins, Sara Bergman, Adrian Cockcroft, Sarah (Chun-Wei) Hsu, Asim Hussain Sustainability has been deemed the greatest challenge of all time for many generations, yet, we have reached any substantial progress to defeat it. This is true across many industries, including the software sector. 16:10 Churchill (Ground Fl.) Session language From Runtime Efficiency to Carbon Efficiency Michal Dorko Software Engineer @GoldmanSachs Goldman Sachs’s proprietary language, Slang, is a core technology responsible for booking trades, quoting prices and analysing risk, among many other use cases. Therefore, Slang requires a lot of computing power to support GS’s Global Markets Business.