Constructing green software services: From service models to cloud-based architecture

Abstract

In recent years, green software research is gaining momentum from the acute need for sustainable development as well as the far-reaching effect of ICT to our society. ‘[Green and] Sustainable Software is software, whose direct and indirect negative impacts on economy, society, human beings, and environment that result from development, deployment, and usage of the software are minimal and/or which have a positive effect on sustainable development’ [4]. Based on this definition, the green software research is growing in two directions. The first direction looks into the runtime energy consumption of software [15] and its engineering pro-aspects of our society and investigates how software can be used to improve the sustainability of a broader range of business, social and individual activities [5]. This chapter is focused on the research and development in the second direction—to leverage software to solve sustainability problems in a wider scope.