Cloud Infrastructure, Efficiency and Sustainability

Update: 2025-05-08

Description

Host Anne Currie is Joined by the esteemed Charles Humble, a figure in the world of sustainable technology. Charles Humble is a writer, podcaster, and former CTO with a decade’s experience helping technologists build better systems—both technically and ethically. Together, they discuss how developers and companies can make smarter, greener choices in the cloud, as well as the trade-offs that should be considered. They discuss the road that led to the present state of generative AI, the effect it has had on the planet, as well as their hopes for a more sustainable future.

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Anne Currie: LinkedIn | Website
Charles Humble: LinkedIn | Website

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News:

The Developer's Guide to Cloud Infrastructure, Efficiency and Sustainability | Charles Humble [01:13 ]
Charles Humble on O'Riley [01:50 ]
Building Green Software [Book] [02:09 ]
Twofish Music [48:03 ]

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TRANSCRIPT BELOW:

Charles Humble: In general, if you are working with vendors, whether they're AI vendors or whatever, it is entirely reasonable to go and say, "well, I want to know what your carbon story looks like." And if they won't tell you, go somewhere else.

Chris Adams: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables, brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discuss the latest news and events surrounding green software. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software.

I'm your host, Chris Adams.

Anne Currie: Hello and welcome to Environment Variables, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. Today I'm your guest host Anne Currie, and we'll be zooming in on an increasingly important topic, cloud infrastructure, efficiency and sustainability.

Using the cloud well is about making some really clever choices, really difficult choices upfront. And they have an enormous, those choices an enormous impact on our carbon footprint, but we often just don't make them. So our guest today is someone who's thought very deeply about this.

So Charles Humble is a writer, podcaster, and former CTO who has spent the past decade helping technologists build better systems, both technically and ethically. He's the author of The Developer's Guide to Cloud Infrastructure, Efficiency and Sustainability, a book that breaks down how cloud choices intersects with environmental impacts and performance.

So before we go on, Charles, please introduce yourself.

Charles Humble: Thank you. Yes, so as you said, I'm Charles Humble. I work mainly as a consultant and also an author and a technologist. I have a, my own business is a company called Conissaunce, which I run. And I'm very excited to be here. I speak a lot at conferences, most recently, mainly about sustainability. I've written a bunch of stuff with O'Reilly, including a series of shortcut articles called Professional Skills for Software Engineers, and as you mentioned most recently, this ebook, which I think is why you've invited me on.

Anne Currie: It is indeed. Yes. So, to introduce myself, my name is Anne Currie. I've been in the tech industry for pretty a long time. Pretty much the same as Charles, about 30 years. And I am one of the authors of O'Reilly's new book, building Green Software, which is entirely and completely aimed at the folks who will be listening to this podcast today.

So if you haven't listened to it, if you haven't read it or listened to it because it is available in an audio version as well, then please do so, you'd enjoy it. So, let's get on with the questions that we want to ask about today. So, Charles, you've written this great ebook, which is also something everybody who's listening to the podcast should be reading.

And we'll link to it in the show notes below. In fact, everything we'll be talking about today will be linked to in the show notes below. But let's start with one of the key insights from your book, which is that choices matter. Things like VM choices matter, but they're often overlooked when it comes to planning your cloud infrastructure.

What did you learn about that? What do you feel about that, Charles?

Charles Humble: it's such an interesting place to start. So I think, when I was thinking about this book and how I was putting it together, my kind of starting point was, I wanted like a really easy on-ramp for people. And that came from, you know, speaking a lot at conferences and through some of the consulting work I've done and having people come up to me and say, "well, I kind of want to do the right thing, but I'm not very clear what the right thing is."

And I think one of the things that's happened, we've been very good about talking about some of the carbon aware competing stuff, you know, demand shifting and shaping and those sorts of things. But that's quite a, quite an ambitious place to start. And oftentimes there are so many kind of easier wins, I think. And I kind of feel like I want to get us talking a little bit more about some of the easy stuff. 'Cause it's stuff that we can just do. The other thing is, you know, human beings, we make assumptions and we learn things and then we don't go back and reexamine those things later on. So I've occasionally thought to myself, I ought to write a work called something like Things That Were True But Aren't Anymore or something like that

because we all have these things. Like my mental model of how a CPU works until probably about two years ago is basically a Pentium two .And CPUs haven't looked like a Pentium two for a very long time, and I have a feeling I'm not the only one. So, you were specifically asking about like CPUs and VM choices, and I think a lot of the time, those of us, certainly those of us of a certain age, but I don't think it's just us, came through this era where Windows and Intel were totally dominant. And so we naturally default to well, "Intel will be fine"

because it was right for a long time.

Anne Currie: Yeah.

Intel

Charles Humble: was the right

Anne Currie: Who could ever have imagined that Intel would lose the data center? It's

Charles Humble: Absolutely it is extraordinary. I mean obviously they lost mobile mainly to ARM and that was very much a sort of power efficiency thing. Fair enough. But yes, the idea that they might be losing the data