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Green IO with Gaël Duez explores how to reduce the environmental impact of our digital world. Twice a month, on a Tuesdays guests from across the globe share insights, tools, and alternative approaches, enabling all responsible technologists, within the Tech sector and beyond, to build a greener digital world, one byte at a time.
55 Episodes
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Moore’s law is dead! Long live Eroom’s law!
This provocative statement from Tristan Nitot highlights the pivotal role of software engineers in our journey as an industry toward a sustainable and more frugal digital world. The majority of our old devices, from smartphones to desktop, still work. How come that we waste such a massive gathering of precious resources such as minerals, energy, water and even our human time which we use to manufacture and maintain them? What should we do to break the trend of electronic waste and the ever-increasing footprint of the IT sector on our physical world?
Gael Duez sat down with Tristan Nitot to start answering these questions in this Green IO episode where we covered:
⚖️ Why Wirth’s law matters more than Moore’s law
🗑️ How the Auvergnat cultural aversion for waste accelerated the birth of the Eroom’s law
🔎 How to find (sustainability) weakness in your software,
🐍 Why Python is not (always) guilty of being resource hungry and how to embrace a wise use of alternative libraries such as Polars,
✨The real ROII of using AI to optimize software.
Have you ever heard “The complaint of the lonely sustainability champion”? Its IT sector version?
Here it is “I listen to the Green IO podcast and others as well, I read newsletters and articles from CAT, GWF, Boavizta, Greenit.fr, GSF, etc. But I’m isolated as a green software champion. I have the feeling that I cannot achieve much by myself. How could we actually do green software in my company?”
This episode is all about sharing one concrete use case of someone, Annie Freeman, who achieved to build and deploy an internal tool monitoring carbon emissions in a SaaS company, Xero, with more than 4M users of its accounting software across a dozen countries.
This achievement, among others, has won her to be named a finalist in the New Zealand Sustainable Business Network Awards in 2024
And she started it all by herself when she raised her voice in 2022 at a Xero’s internal technology conference despite having joined the company as a software engineer just a few months ago.
In this episode, Annie Freeman shares great insights with host Gaël Duez on:
💪 How two motivated engineers can start a movement in a 4K employees company,
🔎 Tracking the cultural change signals,
🔄 Bringing carbon awareness in existing process rather than creating new ones,
🎓🛠️ Making Community of Practices & tooling working hands in hands,
📊 How Data management primes over UI when deciding to build a carbon dashboard,
🎙️ Why listening to Green IO actually helps (not Gaël saying 😉).
3 billion gamers worldwide, billions of devices, terabytes of data streamed, the gaming industry comes with pretty big numbers starting with its $455 billion sales in 2023.
Is its environmental footprint as big? (Not) fun fact, not a single executive in this sector could answer the question.
A new non-profit initiative, the Sustainable Gaming Alliance, is trying to get these numbers right and to equip the industry with the right framework. Its Managing Director, Maria Wagner, and its Research and Standard lead, Dr Benjamin Abraham joined this Green IO episode where great insights were shared on:
👿 The periodic table of torture for gaming device,
🖼️ The Gaming industry dependency on graphics to boost its sales
🕹️ Why “this game is beautiful” should be replaced as a praise by “this game is so enjoyable”
📋 Why GHG protocol is not adapted to the gaming industry
🌋 How to shake up a multi-billions industry in 10 weeks ?
🔄 Why the project mode in the game industry - and elsewhere? - doesn’t help a GreenOps culture to flourish
😴 Energy consumption at idle state
They both went to this job interview to hone their skills, and got a dream job at Microsoft! In its fast-growing and AI-pioneered Azure division. With a romance on top of it…
Yet several years later, they decided to both resign. Why? On sustainability ground, and more specifically for the lack of support on “enabled emissions” issues.
Holly and Will Alpine are now the Bonnie & Clyde of Azure and give us insider perspectives, in a nuanced and well-documented way, on this “elephant in the room” about sustainability claims in all big tech companies.
In the final part of this 2-part episode, great insights were shared on :
🤯 What is enabled carbon and why it offsets by far all Microsoft achievements
😈 Devil is in the details from tailored solutions to “carbon-neutral” oil company not following standard definitions of “net-zero”
✨ Can responsible AI principles really not mention anything about the environment?
⚖️ Why regulation will ultimately be needed
♀️✊ And … the Pussy Riot!
They both went to this job interview to hone their skills, and got a dream job at Microsoft! In its fast-growing and AI-pioneered Azure division and with a romance on top of it… 💕
Yet several years later, Holly and Will Alpine decided to both resign. Why? On sustainability ground, and more specifically for the lack of support on the “enabled emissions” issues. 🕵️
Holly and Will are now the Bonnie & Clyde of Azure and they provide us with an insider perspective, in a nuanced and well-documented way, on this “elephant in the room” in all big tech companies: are their sustainability claims offset by the so-called enabled emissions? 🐘
In this first part of this 2-part episode, Holly and Will shared great insights with Gaël Duez on:
🌱 Microsoft’s employee grassroots sustainability initiative which gathers now more than ten thousands people
⚖️ The opportunity cost for most middle management to support sustainability initiatives
🛠️ The difference between attributional and consequential methodologies and why it impacts the adoption of SCI enabled tools
💰 Can investing millions in local community support justify the increasing data center expansion?
Today, we don’t have 1 or 2 guests but 12! In partnership with the YouTube channel Architect Tomorrow, we are glad to share with you snippets and interviews of the speakers who made the latest Green IO Conference in London a huge success last month.
I have no idea if you have some appetite for this kind of content so feel free to come back to me at contact@greenio.tech or just comment on our posts on social media.
One last thing, the audio quality is ok but not great because of the noise at the venue. If this episode gets some success, we will try to find a quieter place and better gear for the next editions of Green IO starting with Green IO Paris on December 4th and 5th.
Still, I hope you’ll enjoy this episode as much as we enjoyed crafting Green IO London 2024 for its attendees.
🔎 Green SEO? Not the most widespread concept in the sustainability field. Still, seasoned web designers and developers know it well: folks in charge of SEO often have the final say when it comes to content, design and even sometimes technical choices. And on top of this influence, SEO practices also carry their own environmental footprint being very data hungry.
🎙️ In this episode, Gaël DUEZ invites two seasoned SEO practitioners and pillars of BrightonSEO - one of the world’s top conferences on the topic - Stuart Davies, founder of the Ethical Agency Creative Bloom, and Natalie Arney, an SEO Consultant with a knack for sustainability to explore Green SEO.
Some Takeaways:
↔️ the transversality of SEO functions,
💻 the alignment of the core web vitals with sustainability goals,
🌐 The importance of choosing sustainable hosting providers,
♻️ Practical sustainable SEO practices,
and much more.
In the early 2020s, companies started facing a big question: how could they be more responsible in the digital world? Could something similar to CSR exist for this virtual and yet highly materialized world? Corporate Digital Responsibility (CDR) was coined to offer some much-needed guidance.
🎙️ To explore its ramification, Gaël DUEZ chats with two renowned experts in CDR: Aiste Rugeviciute, co-author of “B.A.-BA du Numérique Responsable” and now pursuing a PhD in the socio-ecological impacts of CDR strategies, and Rob Price, a key player in developing an international CDR framework. Rob also hosts the “A New Responsibility” podcast, diving deep into CDR's role in business.
Some Takeaways:
🔑 the CDR framework in a nutshell,
🌿 the importance of embracing a balanced approach to CDR in most companies, and
🛠️ a sneak peek to the newly-released CDR maturity model.
💭Fueled by the ongoing artificial intelligence boom, data centers are popping up around the world like mushrooms after a good rain raising serious sustainability concerns. Hence a pressing question: can the data center industry become circular?
🎙️To get some answers, Gaël Duez welcomes a veteran in Circular Economy and Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment, Prof. Deborah Andrews, from London South Bank University, the founder and academic lead for CEDaCI.
Some Takeaways:
💡 how the CEDaCI Compass tool can help data center being equipped more sustainably,
♻️ current inadequacies in recycling infrastructure for electronic waste, and
⚡ concerns about the rapid development of AI and its energy demands
💭 How can a country defining itself as an high-tech spearheader can embrace IT sustainability? Japan is a fascinating example of both the contradictions and the synergies that such a journey creates.
🎙️ In this episode, Gael Duez welcomes two long-time Japan-based experts: Paul Beddie, VP and Sustainability Lead at Capgemini, and Trista Bridges, the co-author of Leading Sustainably, and a member of EcoVadis' Purpose Committee. Their exchange on IT sustainability initiatives in Japan led to many takeaways including:
🤝 the stakeholder-oriented nature of Japanese society,
🌱 the emergence of Japanese startups focusing on sustainability,
⚖️ the role of regulations in driving sustainability efforts in Japan,
And much more.
💭Decarbonizing tech stacks and platforms? This is the challenge many CTO face these days.
🎙️In our 42th episode, 2 CTOs with different backgrounds and operating in different lines of business cross share their experience in reducing the environmental footprint of their operations. Ludi Akue, former Lunii’s CTO, and Owen Rogers, .eco’s CTO meet Gael Duez to share their insights and reflect on each other journeys in sustainability.
Some Takeaways:
🌐 pro and con of migrating infrastructure to a lower carbon region,
⚙️ how to leverage technical debt to boost decarbonization,
💰 when does optimization pay for decarbonization,
⚠️ the pitfall of creating a separate program to steer sustainability,
and much more!
☁️ What can AWS users achieve today in terms of decarbonization? And what can they expect tomorrow?
🎙️ In this episode, Gael Duez welcomes Adrian Cockcroft, the former creator and leader of the AWS sustainability team who now leads the Green Software Foundation project “Real Time Cloud”. They had an in-depth chat about measuring carbon for software and the sustainability challenges of Cloud providers, starting with AWS. Some of Adrian’s takeaways were:
⚡ The case for PPA and market based approach facing the AI energy-hungry boom
☀️ Why we should not chase the sun
🌱 Sustainability of the Cloud vs Sustainability in the Cloud and other architecture tips
☁️ His confidence in getting a standard for Cloud-based GHG emissions
🤝 Why AWS internal structure prevented sustainability to ramp-up and why it should change
… And much more!
🤔 Why do we do so little to decarbonize software despite already knowing so much?
🎙️ In this episode, Gael Duez is joined by Janne Kalliola, author of "Green Code," together with Satu Heikinheimo, Planet Diplomats’ founder, to discuss how to trigger more actions among Tech people to reduce the carbon footprint of our code.
🌍 Both being based in Finland, a nice side-benefit of their exchange was exploring how the Nordic countries handle the environmental footprint of digital technology.
Key takeaways:
🏃 trend of employees considering resigning if their company's values don't align with their own,
🤝 importance of collaboration among multidisciplinary teams to create sustainable digital products and services,
⚙️ concept of carbon-neutral software and the choice of focusing mostly on energy consumption, and
💡 Nordic approach to trust, self-organization, and low hierarchy in fostering psychological safety and agency for individuals to drive sustainable initiatives
🔎 Major regulations have been built up in Europe these past years impacting the Tech sectors. How have they been built? What does it take to pass these kinds of bills in the unique European Union political system? And what are the consequences for the people working in the digital industry?
🎙️ This episode 39 welcomes Kim Van Sparrentak, a Member of the European Parliament involved in legislation related to tech and sustainability, and Max Schulze, the founder and chairman of the Sustainable Digital Infrastructure Alliance, one of the main lobby groups for more responsible technology. Together with Gael Duez, they share their perspective on the European regulations in Tech.
Some points which have been discussed:
⚖️ the Artificial Intelligence Act,
🌱 Environmental transparency among actors, and
🤝 the Influence of big tech companies through lobbying
🔎 What are the main angles to be covered when you truly want to design, run, and sometimes decommission, software, in the greenest possible way?
🎙️ In this episode, Sara Bergman, a seasoned software engineer and one of the acclaimed co-authors of the O’Reilly book “Building Green Software” joins Gael Duez to discuss the book, and more specifically the chapters on AI, measurements, and hardware.
Some takeaways:
💻 Software people’s responsibility in utilizing hardware
🌡️ Concept of temperature-aware computing
☁️ Importance of major cloud providers
🌱 Some follow-up on the discussion on carbon-aware vs grid-aware computing for more effective environmental impact
💡In product management, there is a strong culture of adapting to change, testing, and rapid learning. Talking about change, we have a big big one ahead of us: climate change! How can product leaders include climate considerations into the build and run of digital services and scale sustainable practices?
🎧In this episode, Gael interviewed two hands-on experts and daily practitioners in product management on how to become a climate-conscious PMs. Antonia Landi, based in Germany, is a strong voice in ProductOps, and François Burra, based in Canada, is the co-author of the Climate Product Management Playbook.
What product manager should consider?
🌱 Environmental impact throughout the product life cycle,
💻 Minimalistic approach on user experience,
🎯 Climate-related OKRs and reducing costs through intentional data storage.
📈 44 cm water level rise under the IPCC business as usual scenario.
This number shows that climate change is very real for Singaporeans and for their data centers, close to 10% of the whole of APAC!
🎧In episode 36, Gaël Duez discussed with Professor PS Lee, National University of Singapore Dean's Chair of Mechanical Engineering and one of the top experts worldwide on data center cooling, the challenges in making data centers sustainable.
🔍Some key points of their exchange are:
🌡️ why temperature rise has multiple downside,
⚡ energy challenges that affects the sustainability of data centers,
❄️ liquid cooling technology as an important option,
🗺️ why lessons from DC operating in tropical climate apply almost everywhere.
And much more!
⚙️Cybersecurity and sustainability do share a complex relationship!
The two approaches share commonalities, such as grappling with resistance from teams and executives and prioritizing resilience, but they also seem to split in notable ways such as constant updates in cybersecurity impacting bloatware and equipment obsolences.
🎧In this episode Gaël Duez invited two experts on the field, Mary Prokhorova from InDevLab and Michael Oghia from Datacenter Changemakers, to discuss the nuances of cybersecurity and sustainability’s relationship.
🔎Some few takeaways from their conversation are:
💡the critical role of IT infrastructure in modern business processes
💡importance of protecting critical infrastructure to avoid environmental damage and societal impacts
💡significance of investing in digital infrastructure to support the green revolution and highlighting the impact of climate risks on both physical and digital security
🎙️In our latest episode, Hannah Smith, the COO of the Green Web Foundation, and Ismael Velasco, the founder of the Adora Foundation, highlight the potential pitfalls of Carbon Aware Computing a strategy that aims to reduce carbon emissions by aligning software operations with the carbon intensity of the energy grid. While this approach has gained traction among the IT industry, including giants such as Apple, Microsoft, and Google, Hannah and Ismael discuss with our host Gaël Duez its complexities and limitations.
💻As they explored the nuances of Carbon Aware Computing, it gave us insights that while it holds promise as a tool for reducing emissions, it also poses challenges that must be carefully considered. The oversimplification of energy grid dynamics and the myriad factors that influence carbon intensity underscore the need for a more comprehensive understanding of sustainable computing practices.
🔍How open source software slashes energy consumption, extends hardware lifespan, and drives sustainability?
🎙️In this episode, Gael Duez as he unravel the intricate relationship between open source software and IT sustainability together with Oliver Cronk, the host of Architect Tomorrow podcast and Sustainable Technology practice lead at Scott Logic (UK), alongside his software engineer colleague Katie Davis.
💡Open source software (OSS) and hardware (OSH) are not just benefiting companies, but also driving global sustainability efforts. With insights from a recent HBR study revealing OSS's monumental impact on reducing software development costs, the stage is set for an insighful conversation.
💻Katie breaks down the key to OSS success: transparency. Learn how freely available code empowers developers to make efficient, sustainable choices, while Oliver highlights the importance of common hardware standards and circularity to combat waste and inefficiency.
📊Dive into the battle for open-source data transparency with Katie, and explore Oliver's vision for the tech community's future direction. From reducing emissions with initiatives like the Tech Carbon Standard to innovative projects like the Cloud Carbon Footprint tool and the Open Compute Project, the episode is packed with actionable insights and inspiring solutions.
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