A survey of 504 DevOps practitioners finds 59% work for organizations that have a sustainability initiative specifically tied to application development and deployment.
Conducted by Techstrong Research, the survey also finds that 54% of respondents work for organizations that have sustainability initiatives tied to IT operations.
Other areas that have sustainability initiatives include improving application software efficiency (45%), site reliability engineering (39%), cloud migrations (37%), artificial intelligence (29%) and platform engineering (28%).
Mitch Ashley, principal analyst for Techstrong Research, said from cloud resource consumption to AI processing to software design decisions, sustainability is now part of the conversation. Sustainability considerations will have a strong influence on the software, infrastructure and operational decisions, he added.
The amount of carbon an IT organization is on one level just another type of cost metric. IT environments that generate excessive amounts of carbon are consuming IT infrastructure resources at rates that are probably inefficient. Optimizing the rate at which IT infrastructure is consumed will both reduce costs and reduce the overall amount of carbon emissions. The challenge is that as application workloads become more distributed it’s difficult to continuously assess how efficiently software is running.
The simple fact of the matter is that many IT teams, especially in a cloud era that makes it relatively trivial for developers to spin up virtual machines, have not been paying a lot of attention to the amount of infrastructure they consumed.
In addition, there are still plenty of opportunities to replace legacy applications with a more modern application that executes code much more efficiently. Much of the code running in production environments today was written at a time when how efficiently that code might run was less of a pressing concern than it is today.
Fortunately, there are more tools available that enable IT organizations to track power consumption as part of an effort to reduce carbon emissions.
The SustainableIT.org consortium has also developed a set of 240 industry agnostic metrics for tracking and measuring the impact of sustainability initiatives. The non-profit consortium also partnered with ServiceNow to infuse best sustainability practices into its IT management platforms.
The Green Software Foundation (GSF), meanwhile, is working with SustainableIT.org to define a set of best practices for writing energy-efficient code.
Additionally, Red Hat has donated an open source Kubernetes-based Efficient Power Level Exporter (Kepler) tool that captures power usage metrics from Kubernetes clusters to the to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).
Cloud service providers now also routinely make available reporting tools to enable organizations to more precisely track how much carbon they are generating.
Right now, tracking of carbon emissions is still a bigger issue in Europe than most anywhere else and it remains to be seen how much regulatory pressure might be applied to organizations in the U.S. as a new administration take office. One way or another, however, the pressure to consume IT infrastructure resources as efficiently as possible is only going to continue to rise in an era where organizations are not just concerned about environmental impact but also the total cost of IT.
For more information, download a copy of the DevOps Next report here.
