Instilling the idea of Sustainability into Development Teams

Inculcating Green coding practices and patterns with the development team is a modern-day challenge. It can go a long way to reducing the carbon footprints and long-term sustainable goals of an organization. 

Good Green coding practices improve the quality of the software application and directly impact the energy efficiency on which the software applications are running. However, the software developers of today's agile work environment seldom focus away from rapid solution building in reduced sprint cycles. They have all the modern frameworks and libraries at their behest, and writing energy-efficient code is not always the focus. Furthermore, modern data centers and cloud infrastructure provide developers with unlimited resources resulting in high energy consumption and impacting the environment. 

Below are some of the factors that improve the programming practices and can show a drastic impact on the Green Index 

a) Fundamental Programming Practices

Some of the fundamental programming practices start with proper Error and Exception handling. It also includes paying extra attention to the modularity and structure of the code and being prepared for unexpected deviation and behavior, especially when integrating with a different component or system.

b) Efficient Code Development

Efficient code development helps to make the code more readable and maintainable. Efficient code writing includes avoiding memory leaks, high CPU cycles, and managing network and Infrasturc Storage in a proficient manner. It also includes avoiding expensive calls and unnecessary loops, and eliminating unessential operations. 

c) Secured Programming Mindset

A secured programming mindset ensures that the software application has no weak security features or vulnerabilities. Secured programming also includes protecting data, data encoding, and encryption. OWASP vulnerability list awareness and performing timely Penetration testing assessments ensure the application code is compliant with the required level of security.

d) Avoidance of Complexity

A complex code is the least modified and the hardest to follow. A piece of code developed may in the future be modified by several different developers, and hence avoiding complexity when writing code can go a long way to keep the code maintainable. Reducing the cyclomatic complexity of the methods by dividing the code and logic into smaller reusable components helps the code to remain simple and easy to understand. 

e) Clean Architecture concepts

Understanding Clean Architecture concepts is essential to allow changes to the codebases. In a layered architecture, understanding the concerns of tight coupling and weak cohesion helps in reusability, minimal disruption to changes, and avoids rewriting code and capabilities. 

Conclusion

As Architects and developers, it is essential to collect Green metrics on a timely basis and evaluate the compliance and violations of the code. Measuring these coding practices can be done using various static code analysis tools. The tools can further be integrated into the IDE, at the code compilation or deployment layer, or even as a standalone tool. 

With organizations in several industries now focusing on individual sustainability goals, green coding practices have become an integral part of every software developer. The little tweaks to our development approach can immensely contribute to the environmental impact in the long run.

Harnessing Green Cloud computing to achieve Sustainable IT evolution

A few months back, I had written an article about Sustainability explaining what it is all about when it comes to software development. Since then I have come across this topic in several forums, including discussions with multiple client organizations that have pledged to quantify and improve on this subject. 

Organizations that move their applications towards cloud services tremendously improve their IT environmental impacts and goals of being sustainable. They are several factors that an enterprise has to consider beyond just selecting a cloud provider to be considered environmentally sustainable.

Focus on the following 6 areas can help organizations kick start their Green IT revolution on Cloud.

a) Cost Aware Architecture thinking

In applications built on cloud infrastructure, there are several moving parts with innumerable services. Organizations who have moved to the cloud often find it very difficult to be cost-aware, ensuring optimal usage of these services.

 They are so engrossed in building their core business applications that they don’t invest in cost-aware architecture teams that focus on optimizing the spending by eliminating unprovisioned infrastructure, resizing or terminating underutilized and using lifecycle management. Practices like energy audits, alerts and IT cloud analysis helps to identify costs and identify systems that need to be greened.

Cloud provides services like Azure Advisor and AWS Trusted Advisor helps to optimize and reduce overall cloud expenditure by recommending solutions to improve cost-effectiveness. Services like Azure Cost management and Billing, AWS Cost Explorer, and AWS Budgets can be used to analyze, understand, calculate, monitor, and forecast costs. 

b) Sustainable development

 Building applications using modern technologies and cloud services help optimize development code and ensures faster deployments. It also enables in reduction of redundant storage and end-users energy levels. 

Sustainable development on the cloud has many parts. It involves an end-to-end view of how the data traverses wholistically.  Improving load times by optimizing caching strategies reduces the data size, data transfer quantity, and bandwidth. With new innovative edge service solutions and by serving the content from the appropriate systems, energy-efficient applications can be built reducing the distance at which the data travels. 

c) Agile Architecture

One of the core Agile principles is to promote sustainable development and improve ways of working by making the development teams deliver at a consistent pace.

Cloud services provide tools like Azure and AWS DevOps, which is commonplace for development teams to organize, plan, collaborate on code development, build and deploy applications. It allows organizations to create and improve products faster than traditional software development approaches.

d) Increase Observability

There is a direct correlation between an organization's Observability maturity and Sustainability. In Observability, the focus is to cultivate ways of working within development teams to have a holistic data-driven mindset when solving system issues. The concept of Observability is becoming more and more prominent with the emergence and improvement of AI and ML-based services.

Service to improve automation diagnostics, automatic infra healing, and the advent of myriads of services used for deep code and infra drills, real-time analysis, debugging and profiling, alerts and notifications, logging and tracing, etc indirectly helps in organizations return of investment, increasing productivity

e) Consumption-based Utilization

Rightly sized applications, enhanced deployment strategies, automated backup plans, and designing systems using Cloud's well-architected frameworks result in utilizing the underlying hardware and its energy efficiency. It also serves the organization's long-term goals of reducing consumption and power usages, improving network efficiencies, and securing systems. Utilizing the right cloud computing service also helps the applications to Scale Up or Out appropriately. 

Using cloud-provided Carbon tracking calculators helps gauge systems or applications that require better optimization in terms of performance or better infrastructure. 

Conclusion

With AWS introducing Sustainability as the 6th pillar, green cloud computing has become one of the interesting topics for all organizations across different domains. While we all have come across tons of articles predicting how to save the world from various natural catastrophes and climate changes when it comes to software development on the Cloud, it's the foundational changes that one can start with to bring about the transformation.