Why is sustainability in tech such a hot topic right now? It's not just because the cloud has a bigger carbon footprint than the airline industry, nor because technology will only get more integrated into our society - but how software engineers should be part of the climate solution.
In this track, you will learn how to architect your software systems with sustainability in mind, starting with an overview of the rapidly emerging green software engineering, then the deep-dives into the real-world applications of sustainability best practices. Next, there will be a retrospect of the realization of the climate benefits of performance optimization, before wrapping up with a candid panel on the next steps of accelerating net-zero commitments across industries.
Throughout the day, you will hear from various industries ranging from financial services to public cloud providers, and finally a non-profit: Green Software Foundation.
From this track
Can Green Software Engineering Solve the Climate Crisis?
Wednesday Mar 29 / 10:35AM BST
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.
Sara Bergman
Senior Software Engineer @Microsoft
Why Cloud Zombies Are Destroying the Planet and How You Can Stop Them
Wednesday Mar 29 / 11:50AM BST
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?
Holly Cummins
Full Stack Engineer, Building Quarkus @Red Hat, Former Lead Consultant
Cloud Provider Sustainability, Current Status and Future Directions
Wednesday Mar 29 / 01:40PM BST
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.
Adrian Cockcroft
Former VP Amazon Sustainability Architecture @Amazon
Panel: What’s next? Net-Zero Commitments?
Wednesday Mar 29 / 02:55PM BST
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.
Holly Cummins
Full Stack Engineer, Building Quarkus @Red Hat, Former Lead Consultant
Sara Bergman
Senior Software Engineer @Microsoft
Adrian Cockcroft
Former VP Amazon Sustainability Architecture @Amazon
Sarah (Chun-Wei) Hsu
SRE @Goldman Sachs & Training Project Chair @Green Software Foundation, TechWomen100 Winner, Co-Author of "Building Green Software"
Asim Hussain
Director of Green Software and Ecosystems @ Intel, Chairperson @ Green Software Foundation
From Runtime Efficiency to Carbon Efficiency
Wednesday Mar 29 / 04:10PM BST
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.
Michal Dorko
Software Engineer @GoldmanSachs
