Software sustainability is often treated as a corporate reporting concern rather than an engineering responsibility. Yet architectural choices, inefficient workloads, unnecessary data movement, and over-provisioned infrastructure directly affect energy consumption, operating costs, and system performance.

This session presents a practical approach to reducing software’s environmental impact without compromising latency or reliability. We will examine how to measure energy consumption, identify carbon-intensive parts of a system, and evaluate environment-friendly improvements across application workloads.

Rather than promoting a particular platform or offering generic sustainability advice, we will examine the trade-offs between sustainability, performance, reliability, and cost. We will also discuss when sustainability and performance reinforce each other, when they conflict, and how to avoid optimizations that merely shift resource consumption to another part of the system.

Attendees will leave with a practical measurement approach and a decision framework for designing more sustainable real-world systems.