이 에피소드에 관해
Host Anne Currie is Joined by the esteemed Charles Humble, a figure in the world of sustainable technology. Charles Humble is a writer, podcaster, and former CTO with a decade’s experience helping technologists build better systems—both technically and ethically. Together, they discuss how developers and companies can make smarter, greener choices in the cloud, as well as the trade-offs that should be considered. They discuss the road that led to the present state of generative AI, the effect it has had on the planet, as well as their hopes for a more sustainable future.
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Find out more about the GSF:
News:
- The Developer's Guide to Cloud Infrastructure, Efficiency and Sustainability | Charles Humble [01:13]
- Charles Humble on O'Riley [01:50]
- Building Green Software [Book] [02:09]
- Twofish Music [48:03]
Resources:
- User Interface Design For Programmers – Joel Spolsky [12:03]
- Environment Variables Episode 100: TWiGS: Sustainable AI Progress w/ Holly Cummins [18:12]
- Green Software Maturity Matrix [19:09]
- Writing Greener Software Even When You Are Stuck On-Prem • Charles Humble • GOTO 2024 [23:42]
- Electricity Maps [23:57]
- Cloud Carbon Footprint [36:52]
- Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) Specification | GSF [37:06]
- ML.energy [38:31]
- Perseus (SOSP '24) - Zeus Project | Jae-Won Chung [41:26]
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TRANSCRIPT BELOW:
Charles Humble: In general, if you are working with vendors, whether they're AI vendors or whatever, it is entirely reasonable to go and say, "well, I want to know what your carbon story looks like." And if they won't tell you, go somewhere else.
Chris Adams: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables, brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discuss the latest news and events surrounding green software. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software.
I'm your host, Chris Adams.
Anne Currie: Hello and welcome to Environment Variables, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. Today I'm your guest host Anne Currie, and we'll be zooming in on an increasingly important topic, cloud infrastructure, efficiency and sustainability.
Using the cloud well is about making some really clever choices, really difficult choices upfront. And they have an enormous, those choices an enormous impact on our carbon footprint, but we often just don't make them. So our guest today is someone who's thought very deeply about this.
So Charles Humble is a writer, podcaster, and former CTO who has spent the past decade helping technologists build better systems, both technically and ethically. He's the author of The Developer's Guide to Cloud Infrastructure, Efficiency and Sustainability, a book that breaks down how cloud choices intersects with environmental impacts and performance.
So before we go on, Charles, please introduce yourself.
Charles Humble: Thank you. Yes, so as you said, I'm Charles Humble. I work mainly as a consultant and also an author and a technologist. I have a, my own business is a company called Conissaunce, which I run. And I'm very excited to be here. I speak a lot at conferences, most recently, mainly about sustainability. I've written a bunch of stuff with O'Reilly, including a series of shortcut articles called Professional Skills for Software Engineers, and as you mentioned most recently, this ebook, which I think is why you've invited me on.
Anne Currie: It is indeed. Yes. So, to introduce myself, my name is Anne Currie. I've been in the tech industry for pretty a long time. Pretty much the same as Charles, about 30 years. And I am one of the authors of O'Reilly's new book, building Green Software, which is entirely and completely aimed at the folks who will be listening to this podcast today.
So if you haven't listened to it, if you haven't read it or listened to it because it is available in an audio version as well, then please do so, you'd enjoy it. So, let's get on with the questions that we want to ask about today. So, Charles, you've written this great ebook, which is also something everybody who's listening to the podcast should be reading.
And we'll link to it in the show notes below. In fact, everything we'll be talking about today will be linked to in the show notes below. But let's start with one of the key insights from your book, which is that choices matter. Things like VM choices matter, but they're often overlooked when it comes to planning your cloud infrastructure.
What did you learn about that? What do you feel about that, Charles?
Charles Humble: it's such an interesting place to start. So I think, when I was thinking about this book and how I was putting it together, my kind of starting point was, I wanted like a really easy on-ramp for people. And that came from, you know, speaking a lot at conferences and through some of the consulting work I've done and having people come up to me and say, "well, I kind of want to do the right thing, but I'm not very clear what the right thing is."
