Making Software More Sustainable with Tom Kennes

Tom Kennes: 00:00:00

The most popular person on Instagram is the soccer player called Ronaldo, maybe you've heard of him, when you post a picture it's often seen by about 300 million people. The overhead in terms of energy consumption that is implied there is about equal to the yearly consumption of one Amsterdam household.

undefined: 00:00:18

Welcome to the software delivery club. Where I talk to industry leaders, exploring aspects of the business of delivering and supporting software and production as well as how to lead the change in engineering and IT. Thank you for joining me. I'm your host, Richard Bown and this is episode 17. This time, I talked to Tom Kennis, sustainable cloud consultant and ambassador for the Sustainable Digital Infrastructure Alliance. We discuss how IT and software delivery can be more sustainable and what happens when Ronaldo uses Instagram. We also talked about the impact of programming language choice on carbon footprint, the amount of energy used when watching Netflix and how to right size your cloud infrastructure. Lots to dive into for the techies, with tools that are available to measure the impact of your software, the emphasis is very much on making small changes that add up to a big difference. So there are some really practical tips here for individuals and organizations alike. Hope you enjoy.

Richard Bown: 00:01:18

Hi, welcome to the Software Delivery Club. This time I'm talking to Tom Kennes all about sustainable IT. Tom works as a sustainable cloud consultant at Skyworkz and advises companies in using the cloud in a sustainable manner. Next to that, he's involved as an ambassador with the Sustainable Digital Infrastructure Alliance, the S D I A. A nonprofit organization. Driven by a strong passion for sustainability and technology, he is eager to drive society in a more eco-friendly direction. Hi Tom. Thanks for joining me today.

Tom Kennes: 00:01:49

Hi. Thanks for having me.

Richard Bown: 00:01:53

Now we did work together before So I do know you in a previous life, I'm really interested to find out about your new direction. I know it's, in parallel to your existing work as well. So maybe you could tell us a little bit more about how that works and then we can go onto sustainable IT.

Tom Kennes: 00:02:06

So I've always been interested in sustainability and trying to figure out how I can incorporate society in my work and doing what's good for society. And I think sustainability is, overall the best thing you can do. Anything that's more sustainable will, in the end benefit society. And I noticed that in my work I was mostly working for big corporates, where it's always bit vague how they benefit society. And I just decided at some point, okay, I'm gonna pick up the phone, write emails, start calling around see which people are active in the scene of sustainable IT. then at some point that just started snowballing into my current role as ambassador for the SDIA.

Richard Bown: 00:02:56

And so how that of come about then? So you say you picked up the phone. So was it literally you just connected with somebody or it, was it a few of you created some momentum that, how did that work?

Tom Kennes: 00:03:06

Yeah, so the SDIA has been going on for a longer time. I think they exist now for about four years at least. The founder Mark Schultze has been doing this for about four years. First in Germany, then I think quite quickly also in the Netherlands.

Richard Bown: 00:03:23

Yeah.

Tom Kennes: 00:03:24

So I just run into him, fired this other organization called leap, which is mostly a Dutch organization also tries to fund or direct funds towards sustainability in a broader perspective.

Richard Bown: 00:03:37

Okay.

Tom Kennes: 00:03:39

And I think Mark Schultz is the first guy that I met in this scene of sustainable IT that really went through the same thought process as I did.

Richard Bown: 00:03:48

Okay.

Tom Kennes: 00:03:48

So we quickly hit it off and we, yeah, just for me, it was quite clear from the beginning that I wanted to work with him because we think about these things in the same way.

Richard Bown: 00:04:01

And what is that way of you thinking about things? How does that differ?

Tom Kennes: 00:04:05

So I think most people that enter the realm of sustainable IT go through a similar fashion. First you think cloud is a good thing. Cloud is a good thing. Then you notice that there are some, oddities in there. They notice that why aren't we tackling those things? What's keeping us back? Why can't we measure it? Where can we measure it? There are all these questions that you can go through. You start researching and then at some point you kinda realize, okay, we the real question here is how can we incentivize companies to start reporting on their digital footprint?

Richard Bown: 00:04:40

Yeah and also how you can help them, I suppose as well. Because as you say in cloud, it's not always obvious how you can measure that exactly.

Tom Kennes: 00:04:48

Now in cloud, we in cloud is the least welcome environment where you can measure these things. Cause often there are layers abstraction that does not allow you to, or to read lower level counters if they even exist.

Richard Bown: 00:05:03

Yep.

Tom Kennes: 00:05:03

Which makes sense because you don't want to have this sort of root access in most other environments.

Richard Bown: 00:05:09

So what would you say is sustainable IT then in itself?

Tom Kennes: 00:05:11

So sustainable IT attempts to enable companies and developers to start reporting on their GHG emissions, their carbon footprint, their energy consumption, so it's all about starting from the bottom, I think, because I think if you if you can enable developers to incorporate their footprint in their decision making, you are enabling such a large workforce to do more green, to do better in that context. That's the end goal.

Richard Bown: 00:05:45

And presumably it's a win-win then, isn't it really? Because a company can show their green credentials, but also if it's a bottom up driven thing, that it really brings the organization together in some ways as well. Maybe it's good to touch on the couple of recent events that you've had. I know that you have people coming along to understand sustainable IT, and how does that work with them and how does that drive change in organisations?

Tom Kennes: 00:06:08

Yeah, so I think I think a lot of people are working on similar things at the moment. And we are really trying to align those efforts in a sense. For example, measurement. There, there is not that many options that you can go and there are some tools that are already out there to help you. Some companies are using them as well, I know that ABN Amro says that they're using it, but I've never really seen a report from them. For the rest, I think I, I'm not really sure other companies are already picking this up at the moment. I haven't really seen a lot of companies eager to report on their carbon footprint, but I do know that the big four consultancy firms are busy setting up they're helping out and also product marketing to audit the sustainable footprint of their clients. So I know that there's quite some momentum going on. But the last two years also I think, steered the course a little bit to a different direction for many companies. That's a bit more on the back burner now, but with everything going on, I think it's a matter of time before these things are more you say it top of mind again.

Richard Bown: 00:07:16

Yeah, maybe. But for developers, I suppose it's something that they can do every day or people working in infrastructure or people making choices around infrastructure as well. So do you have some tools or best practices which you recommend for those kind of approaches? Day to day?

Tom Kennes: 00:07:30

Yeah, so the easiest thing you can do, which also saves you money in the end, is just right sizing your deployment, your provisioning your cloud, basically. We see that lot of times we size things for big load, whereas if you would work with more of an auto scaling kind of way, you kind of course mitigate a little bit. I think that's the easiest way to really improve your footprint as well as your financial position. So that's really a win-win.

Richard Bown: 00:07:55

So that's like picking the right size vm, for example

Tom Kennes: 00:07:58

Yeah. That's perfect. Also thinking about developing a service in the first place is it really necessary to have what would imply in terms of sustainability and carbon footprint. That's something that we also recommend a lot, but that's of course a bit more difficult, I would say because it's also very hard to get numbers on these kinda things.

Richard Bown: 00:08:18

Because that's like the build versus buy approach. So should we build it here or should we just buy it from somebody else who's already doing it maybe and leverage their platform?

Tom Kennes: 00:08:25

Yeah, exactly.

Richard Bown: 00:08:27

There's quite a famous kind of league table of programming languages and showing how green they are in comparison or how much energy they use. Are these things that we can also use as developers or system designers to inform our decisions?

Tom Kennes: 00:08:43

Yeah, so the SDIA doesn't really promote certain software types or programming languages. We take a bit more of a broader scope. We also look at UI, data center architecture even energy equip mix, those kind of things. I know some research from the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam which recommends certain tactics that you can apply as a programmer to build better software. But I also really like the research that that gave us that table because if you look at it then you see that python has a energy consumption as 80 times that of C#. This really gives you a lot more quite a good indication how bad Python actually can be and why you should not build your applications in python. Of course, your other side of the coin is programmers time, engineers time, so it's always a bit of a balance, I think. But I think this kind of sustainability metrics aspects. They're slowly finding their way into this decision making process, and this is a really nice example how you can how you can incorporate it, I think.

Richard Bown: 00:09:44

Yeah, sounds really interesting. So do you have any examples of success stories implementations or changes of view, which have been really successful?

Tom Kennes: 00:09:52

In my current project we have replaced some Python code with Go. And that made things much easier in many different aspects I It goes much smaller, builds much faster. It performs a bit better, the overhead's much smaller. So it's and the footprint is of course much lower, right? So you win on many different levels

Richard Bown: 00:10:11

We've touched on what engineers can do. We've touched a bit on as well what organizations can do, but I understand as you say, that timing might be a, an issue in terms of coming out of the Covid 19 situation, business owners being under pressure a little bit, and also the ongoing potential global downturn. So how does the S D I A or how do yourself look at that and say is it a case of we can afford to wait, or should we make these changes now if possible?

Tom Kennes: 00:10:43

Yeah I think it's a difficult question because basically ask you should we wait fixing our long term issues to fix our short term issues? And I'm lucky not in politics. So I'm allowed to look more on long term. And I think these sort of issues they are too important to not fix as well. And I also think from a personal perspective, I've got much more, I can make much more of an impact on those problems, and I can make, on the short term problems, I can't do anything about Covid nor about the Russian Ukraine problems. I think that's something that I as well as many engineers and developers can actually contribute to. That's why, Yeah, that's why I think it's important to do.

Richard Bown: 00:11:22

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense actually. It is something that we can all do at a small level, isn't it really? So how can listeners find out more about the S D I A.

Tom Kennes: 00:11:30

So we of course have a website. We are on LinkedIn. It's possible to become a member as well yourself, even a partner if you want. Then you can post the logo of the SDIA, your website. We also have MatterMost, which basically is some form of a slack forum where you can find all the people that are working in this field and maybe share your I ideas.

Richard Bown: 00:11:51

Okay.

Tom Kennes: 00:11:52

That's also where we post many of our internal updates. Cuz there are some things going on in parallel we also have a conference today in London actually. We're doing the same things as we did before in Berlin and Amsterdam the last two weeks. Yeah, and overall I would say you could always reach out to me or to Max or just directly through the S D I A.

Richard Bown: 00:12:12

Cool. Great. Yeah. And just to reiterate, what are the benefits then for companies to be able to encourage themselves to join this scheme for individuals I think it's quite clear now. What about for companies themselves? Is there a way that the S D I A works as a scoring mechanism or is there some kind of league table?

Tom Kennes: 00:12:29

That's a really good question. I think for a company it's interesting to join the SDIA if you want to market or promote your the way you look at sustainability, I think we are one of the biggest nonprofits in the European Union that focus on sustainable IT and being affiliated with an organization really gives you really to sign that you care about our long term environment. There are also companies that actually contribute as well, that are active in our community forum. That help us to digest information or to conduct experiments or to just spread knowledge. So you can also do that but in the end, I think in the end it's about showing that you care for the environment, which it's something that investors are looking more and more for. And this will be an, a simple way to to show to the bigger audience. And in return you can also extract knowledge from this community, right? Cuz there are lot of people that work on tools or implementations that either give you data on your footprint or that are working on legislation or that focus more on sharing knowledge. So there are different topics in this community as well. You can benefit.

Richard Bown: 00:13:44

Awesome. And is that all in the slack or is it in other forms?

Tom Kennes: 00:13:47

So yeah, this is mostly on "mattermost" which is basically our slack. But it's a open source version of Slack.

Richard Bown: 00:13:53

Okay.

Tom Kennes: 00:13:54

Which we host ourselves on a green server. Which is focused by renewables. And yeah, you can send a mail to the SDIA and then we can add you to to mattermost.

Richard Bown: 00:14:04

So tell me a little bit more about this green server and then the way that this is hosted. Cause that itself is, sounds like a really good case study.

Tom Kennes: 00:14:11

Yeah think I went a bit too far there. And the I think the server is not green by itself. The energy that it's using is green. I do know, a case, which is quite interesting, there is this website I need to look it up. Maybe I could share it with you later. Which is basically a block that directly is connected to a solar panel. And it only is available when there is solar light, right? So at night it's often offline. Of course, even when it's cloudy, it can be offline. There's no, no images. So I think the overall page size is somewhere around maybe one mb I don't know but generally quiet quite low compared to many pages of today. And it powers off when there's no energy available. Which is in my opinion, quite a good thing to do for the environment cuz you don't have to rely on fossil fuels, et cetera.

Richard Bown: 00:14:57

Definitely. Yeah, it sounds really interesting. Yeah, please do share that.

Tom Kennes: 00:15:00

Yeah. I think I also want to take a moment to maybe mention a couple of tools the developers already can use and how this more or less works cuz in the end so I think if you can measure these things, you can also report on them. And it's easier to convince management or to show investors that you are that this is important what you do. And you can also after the fact that what you have done is actually valuable. I think that's also the main challenge we have right now. How can we show that our improvements in software or orchestration also result in lower energy consumption?

Richard Bown: 00:15:34

Absolutely.

Tom Kennes: 00:15:35

So as I mentioned before, also there is this one tool which focuses on performance monitoring counters Which basically directly come from a CPU and say how much energy a CPU is using. These counters are sometimes available, mostly in Intel chips, and Intel also provides an interface, which is called RPL to convert some of these counters into more more user friendly format. So this is basically the only approach that currently exists to from a software level, reach your power consumption. Otherwise you would need to attach a volt meter to your your server or your machine to from the outside get an estimation. If these things don't exist, we, you have to rely on estimation methods and those kind of things. So they're really two separate fields basically in this topic and for the RPL part where you can measure there a couple of tools coming from a French organization called Scaphandre, and it's a tool that you can even use in the cluster on just in a container. You can deploy it on your Kubernetes cluster that exposes metrics to Prometheus that you can use from there. They also have some other tools as well that they use to even calculate embodied carbon, right? So the carbon that has been used to the carbon emissions that that were emitted during the manufacturing part of the server.

Richard Bown: 00:16:55

Okay. Wow.

Tom Kennes: 00:16:57

Quite cool which are all estimations and I think they're the best effort we currently have. So that's that's a part that exists. And if you can't if you can't use these RPL interface or if you're working in a non root environment or when you work on a higher level of abstraction such as lambdas or functions, then I think the cloud carbon footprint calculator and this tool basically it's developed by the most important people in this field that have been working on measuring for a couple of years and this tool actually looks at your cpu utilization in AWS and after the fact gives you a estimation of the power that has been consumed in the process and how much emissions yeah implies.

Richard Bown: 00:17:42

Excellent. That sounds like quite a lot of stuff So Yeah. But if you can share those with me later, that would be perfect and I'll put them in the show notes.

Tom Kennes: 00:17:50

Yeah. Yeah, definitely do share it. What I also like about these tools is that it really enables developers that are eager to do something with sustainability, to start measuring their footprint and to start actually doing something in their daily work. It really brings this quite abstract idea of the sustainable IT into an everyday life of engineer developer. I think that's if you can achieve that as a society, as a industry, we are one big step closer to finding a solution for climate change, for those kind of things, at least for our fields. Maybe good to add one last thing to that because we haven't really discussed that yet, but think it's important to also note people don't know often realize this. Because currently if you look at the total energy consumed by IT we are somewhere at six, seven, 8% of the total energy consumption. There's an estimate and academics are not really aligned here. Also depends on the scope that you use and I've read so many papers that employ different methods or have different assumptions. But it's somewhere in that area. And if you look at the pace that this has been growing over, the last years. If that would continue, we will end up 15, 20%, maybe even 30%. Also, estimations, don't take my word for it. These are all just based on speculation. But so all in all the IT sector has quite a big impact. So if we were to change our ways, we can actually solve quite a big part of this puzzle next to, of course, supplying the tools to make other sectors as, as well more sustainable.

Richard Bown: 00:19:28

A really good point. IT underpins so much of what we do today of course. And it consumes so much power. You don't need to tell me, I have three kids who are eating the it up, the power the whole time anyway. But yeah, if you can make one change, just one app a popular app which will save a fraction of a percent, then globally rolling that out could make a fundamentally large difference.

Tom Kennes: 00:19:48

Yeah, look at Netflix or Instagram. And we don't even have numbers on no accurate numbers that are really reliable on how much energy is consumed by these applications. But there have been predictions that put an hour of Netflix equal to 30 kilometers of driving on an electric vehicle. Personally, I, this seems a bit high to me and Netflix also has been strong in refuting it as well. But I wouldn't be surprised if it's still quite high. And these kind of numbers would also be really valuable to have, right? You can even start thinking about, okay, what if I don't use Netflix today and start doing something now that consumes less energy. And the same for Instagram. For Instagram there have been more accurate numbers around there, and I think that so what I read is that the most popular person on Instagram is the soccer player called Ronaldo, maybe you've heard of him, when you post a picture it's often seen by about 300 million people. The overhead in terms of energy consumption that is implied there is about equal to the yearly consumption of one Amsterdam household. Which is which is this one picture from one person. So this of course this quickly adds. And in these uh, pen scale application services 1% can make so much of a difference. That's why measuring is so important. Cause it, it allows us to start to connect these things in our decision making. And that's really what we're lacking now. Even if you look at our sense of emissions, it's, that's often so much lower than we actually are emitting. There have been studies that ask people how much CO2 is emitted when you use one gallon of gasoline and people have been underestimating their footprint by 70%. So it's incredible how little we actually know about our daily life carbon footprint, or emissions. So there's also much work to do also in that sense to just dedicate ourselves and each other.

Richard Bown: 00:21:45

Fascinating. Brilliant. Tom, thank you so much. We've got lots of things to share with our listeners. Lots and lots of links for you to dig out I think as well. But I'd just like to say thank you so much for joining me. And I'll wrap up for today and I'll say thank you for joining us and see you again on the Software Delivery Club.

undefined: 00:22:02

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