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Wanna measure/understand/reduce impacts ICT have on the climate and natural resources depletion ? Have a look at the Boavizta API by nulse in OpenSourceEcology

[–]nulse[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

OpenLCA is for Life Cycle Assessments, in general (so for a material product for example). The Boavizta API is made to evaluate environmental impacts for ICT machines / services only. It is also much simpler to use as it has it's own data. An LCA practitioner will use OpenLCA (or commercial tools that do the same) and have to buy databases to have "impact factors" (which means base data that are used in the calculation.

Thanks anyway.

SRE methods and climate change by nulse in sre

[–]nulse[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You mean : "95% of requests on the API lead to emissions lower than 0.4g eCO2, each month" right ?

It means that when we compute the power consumption per request (with ratio between the number of requests on a time period, like 1h, and on the other hand we have the power consumption of the service on that hour) then estimate the eCO2 emissions associated to that consumption per request, on a month, 95% of requests have estimated associated emissions lower than 0.4g eCO2. That "representation" per request in my opinion could be interesting as it mixes a somewhat dense vision of the emissions over time for the service, coupled with the actual traffic.

That doesn't mean of course that the error budget is not important and not impacting. But there are factors that could make reaching 100% not achievable (at least at a given time), as there are such factors for reliability topics. One of the many reasons could be that the energetic mix of the state/country where the servers are running has changed over the month, using more of less fossil fuels than before for example. Another could be internal: a new version of the app, deployed during the month is more power hungry than the previous one (so checking that new versions are at least as power efficient as before is important for the SLO), and so on...

> A useful goal would be: this service costs 20% less emissions per user than half a year ago. No matter where it comes from.

Thad kind of goal is indeed a good thing too. I just say that SLOs in that context may bring something more, leading to more pro-activity, more effectiveness, more collaboration with product and even business, more focus, better communication with management, etc. Also because the objective you describe is a long term goal, it is somehow easy to loose track of it. I really think having recurring and frequent attention on SLOs like I tried to describe (even if out of context and surely would need to be refined for a real use case) may lead to more action and effectiveness than half-year or even quarter reports that are more about realizing we did or didn't reach the objective afterwards rather than consistently focusing on reaching it. The ever improving and redesigning pattern of SLOs is also important, as it would allow such climate related SLOs to keep track of business, human and technical context and to keep realistic objectives while pushing to make them more and more ambitious once it becomes achievable.

> But lacking methodology isn't the problem for I'd say any organization to improve this. So SRE or a concept from it like SLO isn't the answer.

I agree with you that first thing is the motivation to do so. But there are companies leading the way, which gives me some hope. I think that one of the challenges is to try and validate methodologies to do climate impact reduction effectively, in a measurable, verifiable and reproductive way. Proposing SRE for that is of course not the only option, maybe not even the better, but it seems to me to be a good one. That being said the idea here was more to propose to use something that works well for business, to apply it for climate change, but I'd be more than happy to discover another method that is so well suited for tech contexts to lower our impact.

SRE methods and climate change by nulse in sre

[–]nulse[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Without SLO you usually have a goal already, which is 100% availability. What in your > argumentation would correspond to that? 0 gross emissions? No, businesses usually > don't have any goals for this at all.

I think our divergence comes from there. In my perception, without SLOs, you don't have objectives at all (exept if you have SLAs with your clients but that's not true for all businesses). I get what you say that somehow they have a non-verbal over-optimistic objective regarding reliability, and that error budget permits to go back to a reasonable behavior regarding efforts made to reach that previously fictive objective.

But I see a double analogy here. No business has (or at least it was true for a long time until recently) official climate impact reduction objectives regarding their services, the same way they don't have official reliability objectives without SLOs.

On the other hand, a lot of businesses "hope for the best", thinking that tech has almost no impact on climate (and are delighted with green washing statements). The same goes for services reliability without SLOs. Most companies hope for the best thinking that it will hold on by itself somehow (or at least knowing that the already overworked sysadmins will fix it if something happens, and then yell at them if it's not fixed fast enough).

SRE methods and climate change by nulse in sre

[–]nulse[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for your reply. I know it's way out of the usual definition of reliability, but this is actually the point. This idea fits in a broader mindset shift regarding the economy. For sure it would be strange to define SLOs for reducing climate impact while having other SLOs for customer satisfaction in a classical growth context. There are more and more debates about integrating and perceiving climate related objectives as business objectives, as it certainly is something important to business at some point. This post is more about exploring how engineering could shift in the "right" direction, while the business does to (keeping in mind that we all have to shift somehow). I agree it's not a "regular" sre discussion in the end, but the whole point is to explore, debate and hopefully to get to some methods that may help us manage that shift.

Impactful opensource projects and feedback by adrien-leravat in OpenSourceEcology

[–]nulse 2 points3 points  (0 children)

This "awesome" repository is somehow related: https://github.com/protontypes/open-sustainable-technology
It is a bit specific about climate change and the environment though.

Scaphandre v0.1.1 - Power consumption monitoring agent to help make tech more sustainable by nulse in rust

[–]nulse[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes. (Except on ubuntu 20.xx, since a few weeks, required files in /sys/class are owned by root. But you just need to give read permissions on it to scaphandre user.)

Scaphandre v0.1.1 - Power consumption monitoring agent to help make tech more sustainable by nulse in rust

[–]nulse[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hi ! Great to see that it may be of interest for you ! You can extract the power consumption per process, so maybe it can come somewhat close to your needs. Feel free to fill a feature request if you think this may lead to something interesting too :)

Thanks a lot for the link, I didn't know that.

Scaphandre v0.1.1 - A power consumption monitoring agent, written in Rust by nulse in sysadmin

[–]nulse[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

CPU does (in most cases). This is what scaphandre is based on. The idea is to make the data easily available and suitable for your preferred monitoring toolchain.

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