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Build A Complete Approach
The transformation to sustainable computing can start in any IT function and go in any order. There are also green principles for every role. There is also an essential shift in organizational culture, where sustainability becomes a consideration on par with reliability or delivery deadlines.
Make Sustainability Reviews Routine
Adopt Green Software Development
Adopt Green DevOps/Cloud Ops
Make Green AI Decisions
Plan the Way Forward
Make Sustainability Reviews Routine
Practitioner’s Tip:
“Implementing sustainable practices doesn’t require a complete system overhaul—it starts with small, actionable steps that create lasting change.”
Make sustainability a routine part of work processes and planning by making it part of the standing agenda. Projects could all have a Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) score included. Add a few questions, such as:
- What was the SCI for this application before and after this revision?
- What is the carbon awareness built into this code?
- Are we using hardware most efficiently, and can we extend the life of the hardware we are using?
Adopt Green Software
Practitioner’s Tip:
“Once engineers realize how their software components affect carbon emissions, they look more closely at what their team is doing.”
Integrate sustainability into the software development life cycle:
- Review and optimize CPU-intensive operations
- Eliminate redundant code, computations, and API calls
- Minimize data transfers with compression, caching, and CDNs
- Eliminate unnecessary data creation and storage
- Choose lightweight libraries and energy-efficient frameworks and languages
- Shut down inactive dev systems to eliminate idling
Adopt Green DevOps and Cloud Ops
Practitioner’s Tip:
“Give a few basic metrics to visualize cloud GHG emissions, even just using your cloud provider’s carbon tool, and provide an equivalent such as driving distance or phone charges. It doesn’t need to be perfect – begin with whatever data you can access, and build from there.”
Make your organization’s data center use cheaper and greener with optimized resource management:
- Right-size VMs, containers, and databases
- Compress stored data and transmitted data
- Vary service levels according to business needs
Make Green AI Decisions
While these software design principles apply to all applications, GenAI’s significant impact on the environment requires additional considerations:
- Question whether a GenAI application is necessary for your use case
- A different technology may fulfill requirements with lower resource consumption and GHG emissions
- Consider financial and sustainability costs—they may exceed the benefits
- If it is the only solution, focus on efficient design and deployment
Plan the Way Forward
Your organization’s adoption of cloud sustainability is part of a broader transformation. Extend your impact by getting involved at a policy and industry level:
- Support advocacy campaigns to contest utilities expanding gas power plants
- Advocate for tighter data center emissions rules such as EU CSRD
- Question the rapid adoption of resource-intensive technologies like billion-dollar GenAI models
- Join advocacy campaigns for green computing and cloud sustainability
By recognizing and reducing the environmental impact of cloud computing in your organization and in the broader industry, you are positioning your organization as a sustainability leader.