Architecture with Sustainability in Mind

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

Session climate

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.

Speaker image - Sara Bergman

Sara Bergman

Senior Software Engineer @Microsoft

Session climate

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?

Speaker image - Holly Cummins

Holly Cummins

Full Stack Engineer, Building Quarkus @Red Hat, Former Lead Consultant

Session cloud

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.

Speaker image - Adrian Cockcroft

Adrian Cockcroft

Former VP Amazon Sustainability Architecture @Amazon

Session

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.

Speaker image - Holly Cummins

Holly Cummins

Full Stack Engineer, Building Quarkus @Red Hat, Former Lead Consultant

Speaker image - Sara Bergman

Sara Bergman

Senior Software Engineer @Microsoft

Speaker image - Adrian Cockcroft

Adrian Cockcroft

Former VP Amazon Sustainability Architecture @Amazon

Speaker image - Sarah Hsu

Sarah Hsu

SRE @Goldman Sachs & Training Project Chair @Green Software Foundation

Speaker image - Asim  Hussain

Asim Hussain

Director of Green Software and Ecosystems @ Intel, Chairperson @ Green Software Foundation

Session language

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.

Speaker image - Michal Dorko

Michal Dorko

Software Engineer @GoldmanSachs

Track Host

Sarah Hsu

SRE @Goldman Sachs & Training Project Chair @Green Software Foundation

Sarah is a Site Reliability Engineer at Goldman Sachs. Sarah is working on a distributed platform in Google Cloud that will support the Global Markets' trading business. Sarah started a grassroots effort in GS to tackle sustainability in engineering and is the organisation lead for GS with the Green Software Foundation. Sarah is also the chair of the Principle’s project for the GSF. Recently, the group and the Linux Foundation launched a free online educational course, Green Software for Practitioners (LFC131), to help software practitioners build, run and maintain greener applications. She would like to see green software becoming an integral part of the educational curriculum for anyone learning to code.

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