We’re looking forward to hearing from Sara Bergman (Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft) at our next online event.
In her talk Sara will be talking about the Green Software Foundation and their Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) Specification tool.
Building green software with the Software Carbon Intensity Specification. There are two broad ways of looking at software: software as part of the climate problem and software as part of the climate solution. Building green software and doing it at scale requires the creation of a trusted ecosystem of people, standards, tooling and best practices. The mission of Green Software Foundation is exactly that.
In this talk Sara will cover some of the work the Green Software Foundation is doing and some of the tooling, like the Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) Specification.
The SCI defines a methodology for calculating the rate of carbon emissions for a software system. The purpose is to help users and developers make informed choices about which tools, approaches, architectures, and services they use in the future. It is a score rather than a total; lower numbers are better than higher numbers, and reaching 0 is impossible.
Sara is a Software Engineer at Microsoft Development Center Norway working in a team which owns several backend APIs powering people experiences in the Microsoft eco-system. She is an advocate for green software practices at MDCN and M365.
She is a member of the Green Software Foundation and a chair of the Writer’s project which is curating and creating written articles on the main GSF website and the GSF newsletter.
When not working you’ll most likely find her hiking or trying to figure out how to grow chilies in sub-zero temperatures.
https://twitter.com/SaraEBergman
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sara-bergman1/
To join us online live or later on Thursday 7th December, please RSVP here: https://www.meetup.com/greentech-south-west/events/288378457/
Where did your interest in building green software come from?
I was lucky to get to take a course named “Green IT” in my fourth year of university studies. The course was great, and it opened my eyes to the impact of the software industry by mandating us to read a ton of research. I think, as a “last edition” millennial, I’ve always been highly aware of climate change and while making climate aware changes in one’s personal life is good, I think we can sometimes have a higher impact at work. And my work is software, so applying climate action to my everyday work made sense to me.
Can you tell us a little about the Green Software Foundation?
The Green Software Foundation is a non-profit formed under the Linux Foundation, founded in 2021 with the mission to build a trusted ecosystem of people, standards, tooling and best practices for creating and building green software. We represent the software industry with our 38 member organization and 802 individual members. GSF is structured into working groups with projects, some of the project outputs are the Carbon Aware SDK, the Software Carbon Intensity Specification and the Carbon Hack 22, You can read our manifesto to learn more here: Manifesto | GSF (greensoftware.foundation)
How green are Microsoft?
Microsoft has been carbon neutral since 2012 and in 2020 Microsoft announced our goal to be carbon negative by 2030. I still remember this 2020 announcement, it was really cool to see the increased ambition from the leadership being communicated so broadly and so boldly. Microsoft is invested in 4 key sustainability pillars, carbon, water, waste and eco systems, each with different goals and action plans. Our yearly Environmental Sustainability reports, which cover these 4 pillars, are open for everyone to read. Internally we also have an amazing employee community dedicated to environmental sustainability.
What is the SCI specification and who would best benefit from it?
The SCI specification stands for Software Carbon Intensity specification. This specification defines a methodology for calculating the rate of carbon emissions for a software system. The purpose is to help users and developers make informed choices about which tools, approaches, architectures, and services they use in the future. It is a score rather than a total; lower numbers are better than higher numbers, and reaching 0 is impossible.
The SCI is for everyone! It is possible to calculate an SCI score for any software application, from a large, distributed cloud system to a small monolithic open source library, any on-premise application, or even a serverless function. The environment the product or service is running in can also vary; from personal computers, private data centers or a hyperscale cloud. It is biased towards action and that is one of my favorite things about the SCI.
Are there any other exciting projects that you’re working on?
Every now and then you can catch me on the Environment Variables podcast (Environment Variables (greensoftware.foundation)), so be sure to check us out wherever you find podcasts.
Thanks for the chat Sara!