Benefits of Green Coding for Sustainability Projects

How environmentally friendly organizations can use green coding to drive long-term success.

Two decades ago, green coding was subject to limitations such as bandwidth constraints and processing power restrictions, which compelled developers to be mindful of the size and intricacy of their code. However, with the advent of more advanced technology, programmers are no longer bound by these restrictions.

As an illustration, enhanced computing power facilitated quicker processing of vast files and applications. Open-source libraries and frameworks enabled software engineers to recycle segments of code in their projects, opening up greater possibilities. Nonetheless, this resulted in programs with a higher number of lines of code, necessitating more processing power to parse it. As an unintended outcome, this led to increased energy consumption and a surge in global electricity demand.

In the pursuit of advancing sustainable practices and transforming their businesses, companies are delving into their established processes to uncover novel efficiencies. This involves scrutinizing the foundational components of their business operations, such as optimizing data storage and reviewing their coding methods.

What is green coding?

Green coding is an environmentally sustainable approach to computing that aims to minimize the energy required to process lines of code, thereby enabling organizations to curtail their overall energy consumption. In response to the crisis of climate change and global regulations, many organizations have established targets for reducing their greenhouse emissions, and green coding represents a means of advancing these sustainability objectives.

Green coding is a subset of green computing, which endeavors to mitigate the environmental impact of technology, including diminishing the carbon footprint of resource-intensive processes like manufacturing lines, data centers, and even the routine operations of business teams. The broader domain of green computing encompasses green software as well, which refers to applications developed using eco-friendly coding practices.

The proliferation of technology, including advancements in big data and data mining, has led to a significant surge in energy usage within the information and communications technology industry. The Association for Computing Machinery reports that energy consumption at data centers has doubled over the past ten years. Presently, computing and IT are accountable for generating between 1.8% and 3.9% of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions.

The high energy consumption of computing using green coding

To gain a comprehensive comprehension of how green coding can curtail energy usage and minimize greenhouse gas emissions, it is useful to delve into the energy consumption of software:

• Infrastructure: The physical components of IT infrastructure, including the hardware, networks, and other elements, necessitate energy to operate. In most organizations, there may be instances where the computing infrastructure is excessively complex or provisioned, leading to wasteful energy consumption.
• Processing: As software operates, it utilizes energy. The level of energy consumption is directly proportional to the complexity of the software or the size of the file, as more processing time is required, resulting in greater energy usage.
• DevOps: During the conventional coding process, developers generate lines of code that undergo parsing and processing through a device. The device necessitates energy, which unless sourced entirely from renewable sources, generates carbon emissions. As the volume of code increases, the device consumes more energy, resulting in a greater quantity of emissions.

Recent research into the pace and energy consumption of various programming languages has revealed that C is the swiftest and most efficient in terms of diminishing energy usage and memory consumption, thereby presenting another avenue for potential energy savings. Nonetheless, there is some dispute regarding how this is achieved and which metrics should be employed to evaluate energy savings.

Writing more sustainable software

Green coding originates from the same principles as traditional coding. To curtail the amount of energy necessary to process code, developers can incorporate less energy-intensive coding principles into their DevOps lifecycle.

The “lean coding” strategy centers on utilizing the minimal amount of processing required to deliver a finished application. For instance, website developers may give priority to decreasing file size, such as substituting high-quality media with smaller files. This approach not only hastens website loading times but also enhances the user experience.

The goal of lean coding is also to minimize code bloat, which refers to code that is needlessly long or sluggish and uses up resources inefficiently. Open-source code can contribute to software bloat since it is meant to support a wide array of applications and consists of a substantial amount of code that is unused for the particular software. For instance, a developer might import an entire library into an image, despite only requiring a fraction of its functionality. This redundant code utilizes extra processing power and leads to superfluous carbon emissions.

When developers implement lean coding practices, they tend to create code that necessitates only the least amount of processing while still accomplishing desired outcomes.

Implementing green coding

The principles of green coding are generally intended to supplement the present IT sustainability standards and practices employed throughout the organization. Comparable to incorporating sustainability efforts in other departments of the organization, green coding necessitates both cultural and structural modifications.

Structural changes

• Improving energy use at the core: Applications that rely on multi-core processors can be programmed to enhance energy efficiency. To illustrate, code can explicitly command processors to shut down and restart within microseconds, instead of depending on default energy-saving settings that might not be as effective.
• Efficiency in IT: This methodology, also known as green IT or green computing, aims to optimize resources and consolidate workloads in order to minimize energy consumption. By utilizing modern tools such as virtual machines (VMs) and containers, organizations can optimize their IT infrastructure and reduce the number of physical servers required for operations. This leads to decreased energy consumption and lower carbon intensity.
• Microservices: Breaking down complex software into smaller, independent services called microservices is becoming a widely adopted method for application development. With microservices, only the necessary services are called upon when needed, as opposed to running a large, monolithic program in its entirety. This approach can result in more efficient application performance.
• Cloud-based DevOps: One way to reduce energy consumption in applications is to use distributed cloud infrastructure, which can decrease the amount of data that needs to be transported over the network and ultimately reduce the energy used by the network.

Cultural changes

• Empower management and employees: To achieve effective change, both employees and management must be onboard. Consistent messaging to the entire DevOps team can encourage adoption, support the sustainability agenda, and make team members feel like they are part of the solution.
• Encourage innovation: Encouraging innovation and promoting collaboration are key drivers for DevOps teams. Organizations can leverage this motivation by encouraging teams to explore novel ways to use data insights, collaborate with partners, and take advantage of other energy-saving opportunities.
• Stay focused on outcomes: When adopting new initiatives such as green coding, it’s important to anticipate potential challenges that may arise. By doing so, companies can be better prepared to address these issues and handle them more effectively.

Benefits of green coding

Apart from the benefits of reducing energy consumption, companies may discover additional advantages to adopting green coding practices, such as:

• Reduced energy costs: One guiding principle is to use less and spend less. As energy prices become more volatile, organizations aim to reduce their power consumption not only for environmental reasons but also to ensure business sustainability.
• Accelerated progress toward sustainability goals: Many organizations today are committed to achieving net zero emission goals or have strategic initiatives in place to reduce emissions and increase sustainability. Adopting green coding practices can help organizations make progress toward reaching these goals.
• Higher earnings: According to the IBM 2022 CEO Study, CEOs who implement sustainability and digital transformation initiatives such as green coding report a higher average operating margin compared to their peers.
• Better development discipline: Green coding allows programmers to simplify complex infrastructures, which can ultimately save time and reduce the amount of code that software engineers need to write.

Green coding and IBM

To learn more about IBM’s approach to green coding, you can begin by reading the white paper from the Institute for Business Value titled “IT Sustainability Beyond the Data Center.”

The white paper explores the important role that software developers can play in advocating for responsible computing and green IT. It examines the four primary sources of emissions from IT infrastructure and examines how the hybrid cloud can fulfill the potential of green IT.

Optimizing your infrastructure is an important step in reducing your carbon footprint and making better use of resources. One of the most efficient ways to improve energy efficiency is to automatically configure resources to minimize energy waste and carbon emissions. IBM’s Turbonomic Application Resource Management is a software platform that can automate important actions to deliver the most efficient use of compute, storage, and network resources to your applications at every layer of the stack in real-time. With this tool, you can achieve greater efficiency without risking application performance.

By ensuring that applications only use the resources they require to function, it is possible to boost utilization, cut energy expenses and carbon emissions, and achieve consistently efficient operations. With IBM Turbonomic, customers have experienced up to a 70% reduction in growth spend avoidance by gaining a better understanding of application demand. Check out the latest Forrester TEI study to learn how IT can contribute to your organization’s drive towards sustainable IT operations while ensuring top-notch application performance both in the data center and the cloud.

One important approach to promote green computing is to opt for energy-efficient IT infrastructure in on-premises and cloud data centers. IBM LinuxONE Emperor 4 servers, for instance, can reduce energy consumption by 75% and space by 50% while providing the same workloads as x86 servers. Green coding can further reduce energy needs by leveraging containerization, interpreter/compiler optimization, and hardware accelerators.

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