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Christopher Tozzi | Mar 16, 2022
If you work in software development, you probably don’t think much about the carbon footprint of the lines of code that you write. Outside of specific niches, such as applications for the blockchain, the energy consumption of software tends to receive little attention.
But the fact is that software does have a significant impact on energy consumption — and, by extension, environmental sustainability. Realizing this, a small but growing number of developers are embracing what’s known as sustainable software engineering.
Related: How IT Operations Sustainability Efforts Can Make a Difference
Here’s what sustainable software engineering means, why it’s important, and how you can adopt its principles.
Sustainable software engineering (or sustainable software development) is an approach to software design, implementation, and deployment that emphasizes energy efficiency and environmental sustainability. The goal of sustainable software is to minimize the impact that applications, and the infrastructure that hosts them, have on the planet.
Related: Devising a Green Cloud Computing Strategy
Sustainable software engineering techniques must be tailored to each application and use case; there is no one-size-fits-all formula to follow to build sustainable software.
In general, however, sustainable software engineering requires developers to focus on:
If you’re a sustainable software developer, you make considerations like these central to your overall software development strategy.
One of the great things about building sustainable software is that it doesn’t usually cost any more than software development processes that don’t prioritize sustainability. On the contrary, it can save money in the long run by reducing your software hosting costs.
There may be some upfront costs associated with turning to sustainable software engineering practices; you may, for example, have to invest in development resources in order to refactor applications to run inside containers, or to rearchitect inefficient applications. But these efforts are likely to pay for themselves by leading to lower overall hosting bills once your applications are made more efficient.
Microsoft calls sustainable software engineering an “emerging discipline,” which it is. Although conversations about the environmental impact of public clouds and the data center industry have been happening for several years, discussion of the role of software — as opposed to hardware — in the sustainability of the IT industry is relatively new.
Still, it’s a safe bet that sustainable software development will become an increasingly hot topic in coming years, as more and more companies look for strategies to become more eco-friendly at all layers of the technology stack — not just hardware.
In that sense, every business that builds software (which is, of course, virtually every business today, if you believe the popular mantra that every company is a software company) can benefit from sustainable software engineering.
Sustainable development practices are one way for companies to become more ecologically and socially responsible. Customers are likely to appreciate these efforts, too.
Plus, as noted above, sustainable software engineering tends in most cases to reduce overall IT hosting costs. You’re likely to spend less on servers or cloud services when your applications run as efficiently as possible.
So, sustainable software engineering is a win-win: It’s better for the environment, and it’s better for your business’s bottom line. Even the most cold-hearted CEO can get on board with that.
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