During software development, savings and increased consumption of different resources as well as functional goals and application economy must be weighed up.
Even though applications help to reduce the carbon footprint of companies and organizations by providing key metrics, their development and operation generate emissions. A comprehensive balance of greenhouse gas emissions from digital systems must take various factors into account – which can be found in the documentation of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, for example.
Only a part of the emissions occurs during the operation of the hardware used, another part is caused by the manufacture, assembly and transport of the hardware. There are also other emissions that are not only due to the development of the software, but also to the continuous operability of the company, such as travel and office space or the use of purchased products and services.
Green software:
- Loss of control and technical failure in software development
- Organizational embedding of sustainable software
- Software development with regard to efficiency and sustainability
- Turn off idle devices in the data center
- Measure energy efficiency and select the right software
- Green software: Generate resource-efficient code with C++
Accounting for these carbon footprint contributions is complex and beyond the scope of this article. The focus is therefore on the emissions that the data center generates when operating the software. The resources used primarily include the computing power, memory, network and mass storage provided by servers and other hardware in data centers. The IT systems themselves also require secondary systems that make up the infrastructure of a data center. The cooling and the uninterruptible power supply produce the lion’s share of the additional emissions.
