Carbon-aware Software Services

TL;DR

This paper introduces a framework for developing and optimizing carbon-aware software services that adapt based on carbon intensity forecasts, significantly reducing emissions while maintaining service quality.

Contribution

It presents a novel methodology using the Strategy pattern and a bilevel optimization scheme for configuring adaptive, carbon-aware services, validated through an open-source prototype.

Findings

Carbon emissions reduced by 8% to 50%.

Framework effectively controls service output quality.

Prototype demonstrates practical applicability.

Abstract

The significant carbon footprint of the ICT sector calls for methodologies to contain carbon emissions of running software. This article proposes a novel framework for implementing, configuring and assessing carbon-aware interactive software services. First, we propose a methodology to implement carbon-aware services leveraging the Strategy design pattern to feature alternative service versions with different energy consumption. Then, we devise a bilevel optimisation scheme to configure which version to use at different times of the day, based on forecasts of carbon intensity and service requests, pursuing the two-fold goal of minimising carbon emissions and maintaining average output quality above a desired set-point. Last, an open-source prototype of such optimisation scheme is used to configure a software service implemented as per our methodology and assessed against traditional non-adaptive implementations of the same service. Results show the capability of our framework to control the average quality of output results of carbon-aware services and to reduce carbon emissions from 8% to 50%.