Going green - sustainable software development

This might be great for the user, but every online interaction comes with its own carbon footprint and, as an industry, we are starting to see that the choices we make in terms of features and hosting have a real environmental impact.

The Green Software movement is gaining momentum and is committed to reducing the environmental impact of technology. This means using less energy, reducing waste and promoting sustainability.

Why it matters

We often talk about Cloud Computing as being slightly magical. But the `Cloud` isn’t fluffy, it's a warehouse full of servers with the air conditioning on full blast.

Whether it’s processing requests or storing data, computing uses a vast amount of energy. In 2020, the information and communication technology sector as a whole, including data centres, networks and user devices, consumed between 4-6% of all electricity used in the world.

The proliferation of AI means this usage is only going to increase. Keeping server farms cool is a huge problem, one research paper estimated that training Chat-GPT3 used the same amount of water as filling a nuclear reactor’s cooling tower.

The competitive advantage of sustainable coding

Happily, considering sustainability in software development decisions can have other direct benefits beyond social and environmental responsibility. Improved efficiency of code can mean faster loading and better performance which in turn leads to increased customer satisfaction and retention. Optimising the infrastructure to reduce energy consumption can also reduce operational costs, improving profitability and the bottom line.

Three things we are doing to reduce our carbon footprint

As creators of a software product we need to balance the needs of our users against the environmental impact of running the platform.

This is an ongoing process and there is so much more we can do, but here are three things we are doing already.

Reducing automation

Automation is a selling point of many software products. Removing manual, repetitive, and time-consuming tasks can be very attractive.

But left unchecked automation can greatly increase an application’s energy consumption.

Take file transformations as an example. Many DAM systems will automatically create multiple image versions or generate video stills when a file is uploaded. This might yield some UX improvements, but auto generated files require processor power to create and disk space to store and may never actually be used.

At BrandStencil we only create the images that are essential for user experience and which minimise the data footprint of each page load. All other image transforms are made on request and are not stored on our servers.

Deleting files

Data storage is an enormous environmental issue.

Storage is cheap and people are terrified of deleting something which might be needed, so they delete nothing; when their available storage fills up they simply get more storage.

According to Gerry McGovern in his article World Wide Waste, around 90% of data is never accessed three months after it is first stored.

At BrandStencil we run a nightly file deletion process which removes everything we don’t absolutely need to keep.

For example, all files generated from users' designs are removed and will only be regenerated on request. We estimate this is equivalent to around 50GB of file storage per year.

Limiting email notifications

It is important to inform users about activity within a system, but emails are expensive from an energy consumption perspective.

To create and send an email notification requires processor power. Further power is required to open and read the message and, unless it is deleted right away, still more to store it.

We evaluated this environmental impact against the productivity requirements and user experience benefits of receiving the email notification.

We are in the process of reviewing all the emails we send from the platform and considering the need with sustainability in mind. So far, this has resulted in a reduction of the emails we are sending with our new collaboration feature and we will continue to review this as part of our sustainable coding process.

One more thing…

Green hosting

Data centers consume about 3% of global electricity in 2023 and this could rise to 4% by 2030. Another way to reduce emissions is to make sure the energy used to power the hardware and infrastructure for your website or web application is 'green'.

You can check your hosting provider's green credentials on the Green Web Foundation's website.

According to GFT, thought leaders in green coding, using cloud computing can be more sustainable, regardless of hosting company as it can be easier to control usage as you only pay for what you use, this in turn reduces your energy consumption. Also, many large-scale cloud based infrastructure businesses like AWS and Google have taken steps to reduce power consumption.

Our hosting is provided by DigitalOcean who is a verified Green Web Foundation hosting provider. This means they use green electricity - 100% renewable energy for the infrastructure they supply. They also use sustainable tech to reduce energy usage in their data centres.

Learn more

The sustainable software development movement is growing, which can only be a good thing for our planet. We’ve found some great resources to help us including;

Green Software Foundation

Green Web Foundation

GFT

Website carbon calculator

Sustainable web design