A year ago, Building Green Software was released by O’Reilly. Since Tim Frick’s book “Designing for sustainability” (8 years ago!), O’Reilly didn’t publish anything fully focusing on sustainability. So, it’s a fair statement that this book was long awaited. 
But a year is an eternity in IT. This is why Sarah Hsu, one of its 3 co-authors as well as the chair of the Green Software Foundation’s Principles of Green Software committee, joined the show to talk about the trends she witnesses first hand in the green software engineering field and how she would envision a v2. More specifically she talked about: 

   🌟 GreenOps being the new kid in the block
   👨‍🏫 What FinOps can teach to GreenOps
   📈 How SRE can help treating environmental metrics like any other business metrics
   🕵️‍♀️ The hard truth about the four nine 
   📏 Progress made in measurement
   🔬 What the Rumsfeld’s Metrics can tell us about the difference between monitoring and observability
   🚧 Why it should always be space and time for deviation
And much more!

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Sarah (00:01 )
I'm a strong believer that we, Software Practitioner, should follow suit with what SRE are already doing. We have to treat the environmental metric like any other monitoring metric and use it to drive critical business decisions.

Gaël Duez (00:15 )
Hello everyone, welcome to Green IO I'm Gaël Duez and in this podcast we empower responsible technologists to build a greener digital world, one bite at a time. Twice a month, on a Tuesday, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability. And because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO. All the references mentioned in this episode, as well as the full transcript, are in the show notes. You can find these notes on your favourite podcast platform and, of course, on our website greenio.tech.

A year ago, Building Green Software was released by O'Reilly. Since Tim Frick's book, Designing for Sustainability, eight years ago, O'Reilly didn't publish anything fully focusing on sustainability. So it's a fair statement that this book was long awaited.

And watching the line during the book signing at Green IO London last year, I guess its launch was a success. But a year is an eternity in IT. This is why I'm delighted to have the last of the Building Green Software's co-authores, who didn't join the show yet, to be with me today, Sarah Hsu, to talk about the trends she witnesses firsthand in the green software engineering field. Based in London, Sarah is a pillar of the Green Software Foundation where she chairs the Principles of Green Software Engineering institution as Site Reliability Engineer. And on top of being an author, she's also a regular speaker at Kubernetes Community Day, LeanAgile and GreenIO conferences. Welcome to GreenIO, Sarah. And first of all, congrats for your Tech Woman 100 Award last year. How does it feel?

Sarah (02:21 )
Hi, Gaël I'm so excited to be here. I love, welcome to Green IO spill. You say that all the time. I feel like sometimes I can hear it in my sleep, you know.

Gaël Duez (02:34 )
Excellent.

Sarah (02:35 )
But anyway, yeah, thank you for asking about the award. Winning it, it did feel great. And while it's fantastic to have my own hard work recognized, and it really is a celebration for everyone who has been part of my journey. It honors the dedication of my incredible teams, my work team, my GSF team, and of course, my book team and it's celebration of the success of all our project. And I guess personally, I think the most important thing that came out of this is that it's a massive, massive kudos to every single person who has invested their time and effort to support me along the way. And that includes you, Gaël things like we met two three years ago at the very, very inception of like green software and green IO.

Gaël Duez (03:30 )
I wasn't expecting to be included in this amazing crowd that you gathered around you I'm a bit surprised, but happily surprised. Thanks a lot. And I have to say that it's great because this recognition, it really highlights that sustainability is a teamwork, but it also shed a very positive light on sustainably being a hot topic in the IT industry and I think we need all these positive signs, especially at the moment. So, congratulations again.

Sarah (04:06 )
Thank you.

Gaël Duez (04:07 )
And without further notice, the I don't know how million dollar question, but actually it could be a Gartner title for one of their study. According to you, what are the main trends that you see in green software since a year ago, since the release of your book?

Sarah (04:29 )
Well, how much time do we have? I'm joking.

Gaël Duez (04:32 )
Between two to three hours. No joking.

Sarah (04:35 )
Hopefully we're not here that long. Well, the space, the green software space has exploded in the past couple of years. Like look at Green IO and the popularity and the engagement has just been amazing. So I guess the first and foremost trend I think is the people, right? The incredible people that we have all met in the past couple of years have been absolutely wonderful.

There really is a real sense of camaraderie. People are here all to learn from each other, to help each other. We are comparing nodes and most importantly, we're celebrating every single little wing within the space. And even though the space really, really has exploded in the past year, we're still in a critical stage of raising awareness among the wider software community. And personally for me, my keynote at Ling Agile, Eddinger Conference last year is one of those moments I probably would never forget. The energy of the crowd that day, it was just incredible. And how appreciative people were of my talk and my time. It really made all those late night and weekend sacrifice worthwhile. So yeah, I think that's the first trend. And it's not strictly technical, but still so important to highlight and hopefully serve as an encouragement to all our listeners out there. We should keep it going. We've got to continue this broken radio energy in every single direction we can to make green software. Not the afterthought, but the first thing everyone discuss in any technical meetings.

Gaël Duez (06:20 )
And I do agree that I can feel this energy and growing concern and the growing commitment of many responsible technologists, would say, whether they work in design, ops, cloud, you know, obviously software development, et cetera, et cetera. Do you have any other trends on top of this people trend, I would say, then don't worry, I've got plenty of much more technical questions.

Sarah (06:47 )
Okay. Yeah. So the second trend, I guess I want to mention is the realization that green software really is not an ivory tower. We're not asking the overstretched engineering team to work on somet