Sustainable Software/ Data Engineering:

Sustainability is composed of five dimensions which are: individual, environmental, economic, technical and social sustainability.
Sustainable SWE is an amalgamation of climate science, software engineering, electricity markets and data centre design.

Eight principle (reference - https://principles.green/):

• Carbon: Build applications that are carbon efficient.
• Electricity: Build applications that are energy efficient.
• Carbon Intensity: Consume electricity with the lowest carbon intensity.
• Embodied Carbon: Build applications that are hardware efficient.
• Energy Proportionality: Maximize the energy efficiency of hardware.
• Networking: Reduce the amount of data and distance it must travel across the network.
• Demand Shaping: Build carbon-aware applications.
• Measurement & Optimization: Focus on step-by-step optimizations that increase the overall carbon efficiency.

How can a sw/ data engineer support the sustainable SWE in cloud infrastructure

** reference diagram from google cloud

\ ** source - (https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-01724069/document)

• Clean architecture for cloud services (microservices, data mesh, federated machine learning)
• Stop resources if you do not need it
• Endorse re-usability
• write code that consumes less energy. ML - energy efficient algorithm with higher accuracy.
• Application (code/ algorithm complexity) - time, space.
  The Energy equation, Energy (J) = Power (W) x Time(s).
  Power variable of the equation, which cannot be assumed as a constant, also has an impact on the energy.
  
  
  ** research paper (https://haslab.github.io/SAFER/scp21.pdf)
  
  
• Use SaaS wherever possible - get help from existing provisioned infrastructure. Similar to a manual geared car. Starting a car from rest to motion is always expensive while the car is already in motion.
• LoC - The minimum the better
• Sustainability checks as a metrics should be part of sw/ data delivery
• Think of unnecessary data movement
• Cheap (spot instance) clusters - low cost does not necessarily mean low energy consumption
• When and where you run the application - generate less carbon footprint
• Lightweight application

** Energy rating marked software could be a future for SW products.
** Possibly a SW engineer could also get such ratings.

*** Petition: https://principles.green/