Blog about Energy Consumption and Sustainable Software Engineering: ‘Growing Green Software’

A new blog here on Medium, called “Growing Green Software” , covers measuring and improving the ecological footprint of Web applications. It advertises itself metaphorically as this:

“Plants the seeds of sustainability in your software. “

“Discover green practices, innovations and insights to cultivate a greener, more sustainable software landscape.”

This post provides an overview of the articles in the blog and points at all articles published so far.

Motivation

I decided to feature the new blog in mine because of the importance of the topic. Sustainability is an core ethical value; all responsible software engineers should have an eye on this important type of non-functional requirement.

IEEE Standard 7000, which is available free of charge via IEEE Xplore, talks about sustainability; so do open-source processes and practices that emphasize the importance of ethical values in software engineering.

Check out the first article “Why Green Software Matters” in the new blog for the author’s motivation to write about sustainable software.

Links to all articles (aka stories) in the blog

The following stories have been published so far:

• “Why Green Software Matters”
• “Software Efficiency and Energy Consumption”
• “Carbon Emissions in ICT”
• “Measuring Java Energy Consumption”
• “Evolution of Energy Usage in Spring Boot”
• “Comparing Java Virtual Machine Energy Efficiency”

The author of all stories is Mirko Stocker, my colleague at OST and co-author of “Patterns of API Design — Simplifying Integration with Loosely Coupled Message Exchanges”, a member of the Vaughn Vernon Signature Series at Addison-Wesley Professional (more information about the book series can be found here and here).

Topics addressed and technologies featured

The blog features technologies such as:

• Java and Spring Boot, by way of the Spring PetClinic sample application
• JoularJX, a Java-based agent for software power monitoring at the source code level
• Apache JMeter
• Java MicroBenchmark Harness (JMH)
• PinPoint, a tool for energy profiling

The story tags assigned to the stories indicate what to expect too:

• Software, Sustainability, Green Software, Climate Crisis, Sustainable Software
• Software Efficiency, Energy Efficiency, Energy Consumption, Green It
• Data Center, Cloud Computing, Carbon Emissions
• Energy Measurement
• Java, JMH, JVM, Spring Boot

I enjoyed reading the posts, and definitely learned a lot in each of them.

Read on…

Hopefully this short post whetted your appetite for going (or growing) green… please check the “Growing Green Software” blog out yourself!

- ZIO

Notes

1. Two public repositories collecting ethical software engineering practices that I co-created are ESE and VDAD.
2. Hopefully the patterns in the book help to reduce emissions when exchanging JSON over HTTP or other protocols!

Originally published at https://ozimmer.ch on January 26, 2025.