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Fastly’s new dashboard helps developers track code’s carbon footprint as 77% adopt green coding, balancing AI’s energy demands with sustainability.
Cloud computing provider Fastly has released a method of tracking the environmental impact of software development.
The dashboard tracks electricity and emissions data, broken down daily by country, bandwidth, and compute. With it, Fastly aims to bridge the gap between what developers objectively know — their work has an environmental impact — and the precise numbers required to report and mitigate that impact.
“What a lot of people find, ourselves included, is that they’re emitting more carbon in some places that they weren’t expecting and that some of those are relatively low-hanging fruit,” said Simon Wistow, co-founder and VP of strategic initiatives at Fastly, in an email with TechRepublic. “This has led to a growing recognition of the role sustainable software engineering and green coding can play in reducing emissions.”
In July and August, Fastly surveyed 809 developers about the importance of sustainability to their daily decision-making. Overall, 77% of developers reported practicing “green coding.” Fastly defines green coding as writing software with energy efficiency and sustainability in mind.
The rising environmental impact of generative AI workloads in particular is well-known. Of the developers surveyed, 51.1% said they “consider” the energy impact of generative AI, but still use it as a tool. Another 34.7% said they limit their use of AI due to its environmental impact. Only a few respondents were either unaware of the energy impact (1.1%) or were not influenced by it “much” or “at all” (13.2%).
“Software development will continue to focus on what makes the most money until governing bodies step in and require environmental sustainability be considered,” said one respondent.
Some respondents said they see opportunities in optimizing energy use in data centers and cloud computing to reduce emissions, writing more efficient code, and eliminating wasted bandwidth on ads.
In January, researchers at Fastly and the University of Waterloo discovered that adjusting just 30 lines of code could improve Linux’s network traffic processing, resulting in a 30% reduction in energy consumption.
The sustainability dashboard can be found within the Fastly platform. The dashboard provides details on the platform’s greenhouse gas emissions, particularly Scope 3 emissions, and energy consumption. Organizations using the dashboard can then convey that information to their customers, which may enable them to compile their own environmental impact reports more easily.
The dashboard takes into account IT equipment electricity consumption, facility electricity consumption outside of IT equipment, the percentage of electricity they use comes from renewable energy (based on the country), and more.
Fastly tracks:
“As we get more feedback from customers and vendors and as more industry standards evolve, we’ll update the dashboard to make things as relevant as possible,” said Wistow.
While the US government is de-emphasizing sustainability reporting, emissions targets remain in place globally. Regional authorities in the US, such as California, still require emissions disclosures. Conversations about sustainability and regulation were at the forefront at Climate Week NYC this week.
“The urgency of climate change is sharper than ever,” said Wistow. “We’re already halfway to 2030, when global emissions must be cut in half to stay within a 1.5-degree global warming limit and stave off the worst impacts of climate change. In addition, companies are looking at both higher energy prices and the rise of AI, with the enormous energy demands it places. As such, more and more of our customers are asking us to be part of their accountability chain.”
The proliferation of generative AI has made it increasingly challenging for companies to achieve their sustainability goals.
Megan Crouse has a decade of experience in business-to-business news and feature writing, including as first a writer and then the editor of Manufacturing.net. Her news and feature stories have appeared in Military & Aerospace Electronics, Fierce Wireless, TechRepublic, and eWeek. She copyedited cybersecurity news and features at Security Intelligence. She holds a degree in English Literature and minored in Creative Writing at Fairleigh Dickinson University.
