DevOps and Sustainable Software

DevOps carries a great number of practices to improve the developing process and continuous enhancements to deliver software applications and services at a better speed and quality. 

DevOps mirrors business requests, and, as we’re witnessing devastating climate crises worldwide, surely ecological concerns should be within the DevOps set of goals too.

The summer of 2022 is one of the hottest in Europe, causing inevitable economic downturns that are due to wildfires, disruptions to harvests, and more. Ongoing ecological problems worry us, so we look for solutions and ways to be more environmentally friendly.

We see the frequency of ecological problems increasing, and there is no doubt that the green agenda is on the table in almost every organization today. Green IT is a new demand from businesses, and IT is an industry that could have a more powerful impact on this problem than any other economic sector.

Recent software requests include many efficiency aspects and are reflected in the mix of strategies and tools offered today by software development companies. Although it is not obvious, the software you use can play an essential role in reducing the devastating environmental impact on businesses.

Why Is Sustainability Vital for Development and Why Should it Be Considered When Choosing New Software Tools?

A sustainable approach to software development has great potential to deliver new heights in the enterprise’s green agenda.

Aspects of negative environmental impact produced by the digital industry include the following consequences:

• With the continuous digital revolution and many services that have moved to the cloud, it all needs much more space and time and has a higher cost. The fewer resources your application uses, the less impact you make on the environment.
• Increased energy consumption requires a closer look, and today’s practices include moving to renewable resources and implementing more sustainable software tools with less energy utilization.
• Cost and time reduction. Some progressive software environments can deliver significant time and cost savings, resulting in less energy use and a smaller carbon footprint. 

The factors above are within the green agenda of a more sustainable business strategy and are often included in DevOps practices. An important fact is that more sustainable software choice often comes together with increased efficiency and fewer resources, thus less cost. 

Green IT

The software has an impact on the environment. Even though it doesn't consume energy or produce any CO2 by itself, it leaves traces on the environment when it is run on hardware. In turn, the way software is designed will affect the level of energy used. Software created with energy efficiency in mind at its operational level will allow the use of less energy and produce greater and faster results.

Moreover, computationally inefficient or power-unfriendly software components on a system might destroy all strategies aimed at power reduction.

Indeed, software plays a vital role in determining overall energy and computational efficiency. Including green software in the goals of the DevOps routine would benefit enterprises not only by way of a greener attitude but will also help cut unnecessary extra costs in the long run.

Among green software, you can find embedded classes of OpenJDK, more efficient software tools explicitly made for better operation on the cloud, such as microcontainers, and many more. We can improve the software industry overall via gradual integration of greener technologies as these products also serve to produce better efficiency results. 

The starting point of a more sustainable approach to software would be evaluating the metrics, which should cover energy efficiency and traditional parameters (e.g., functionality, security, scalability, and accessibility). The next step would be monitoring these metrics and including targets as criteria for CIO performance reviews.

Implementing greener software is not achieved in one day, and some products are within the range of green.

As an example of sustainable software engineering, I can refer to microcontainers and microservices. Meanwhile, cloud-based technology is rising; its software architecture requires lots of space and increases Internet traffic.

Some components of this environment are already improving based on the energy consumption reduction agenda. The smaller the container you use for the cloud application, the less energy and memory footprint the application will require.

Principles of sustainable software engineering reduce the environmental impact, increase the application's efficiency, and optimize the cost. These principles of sustainability in software engineering can be reached via building software tools that are friendlier to the planet, thereby allowing architecture and deployment of future applications in more effective ways and with less energy consumption.

Environmental imprints left by the digital industry keep expanding, especially given the global trend toward an online shift. The green software components we use for developing applications can help significantly reduce these imprints. Today, many software companies are working toward the goal of building greener, more efficient products. Cloud computing can be much greener when smart choices are made for the right software.

There are plenty of examples of green software nowadays, including Microsoft's cloud computing, which maximizes energy efficiency; various microcontainers, which take less cloud space and consume less energy; and more. This line of development could be continued in every software instrument that exists. With the industry moving steadily towards more sustainable software development, it becomes necessary to include the environmental impact metric in DevOps.

How Do DevOps and Sustainable Software Development Relate?

DevOps and sustainable software development are, in many ways, moving toward the same goals of increasing efficiency while reducing cost and use of resources.

DevOps focuses on finding the most effective software organization, and sustainable software development goals lie in reaching the highest efficiency with fewer resources spent. As DevOps acts as one of the key drivers for the tech industry, it is only logical to include principles of sustainable software development into their list of priorities.

The initial concept of sustainable software development was defined by Kevin Tate in 2005, and it was more fixed on limited human resources and rising productivity via agile method principles. Modern sustainable software engineering reflects the ongoing environmental agenda, aiming to reduce the volume of resources we spend on product creation. In practice, these approaches complement each other and look for higher operational power on fewer resources (whether human, energy, or cloud resources).

By setting up and following the practices of sustainable software development, businesses may gain huge environmental, financial, and operational benefits. Installing this culture into the DevOps routine today would certainly help improve the efficiency of enterprise software operations. Many companies are already taking this path.