Creating environmental awareness in service oriented software engineering

Abstract

Carbon emission of IT is an issue. ICT energy consumption is expected to grow by 73% (instead of the originally targeted 26%) until 2020, and the service sector alone counts for 70% of the European economy. Energy consumption is a combination of what we use, and how we use it. Most green initiatives look at what types of devices do consume energy, and try to optimize their up-time as such. Few initiatives, though, measure how do software systems actually use these devices, with the goal of optimizing consumption of devices and computing resources. Basic research is needed to address this software optimization problem. The proposed approach is to make visible the environmental impact of software services by measuring it. In this way, we will become aware of the amount of energy needed by our software, and hence learn how to target software optimization where it is mostly needed. As a first step in this direction, in this paper we define three main problem areas to realize green service-based applications, and propose a service-oriented approach to address them. Thanks to that we can bring clarity in what entails managing and developing green software according to environmental strategies. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.