Mining for sustainability in cloud architecture among the discussions of software practitioners: building a dataset

TL;DR

This study analyzes practitioner discussions on cloud architecture sustainability from StackExchange to build a dataset, revealing a focus on design and economic aspects, contrasting with academic emphasis on environmental sustainability.

Contribution

It introduces a novel dataset of practitioner discussions on cloud sustainability, highlighting practical perspectives and contrasting them with academic focus.

Findings

Practitioners focus mainly on design aspects of sustainability.

Economic sustainability receives the most discussion among practitioners.

Practitioners tend to avoid complex activities like evaluation and maintenance.

Abstract

The adoption of cloud computing is steadily increasing in designing and implementing software systems, thus it becomes imperative to consider the sustainability implications of these processes. While there has already been some academic research on this topic, there is a lack of perspective from practitioners. To bridge this gap, we utilize software repository mining techniques to examine 192 discussions among practitioners on the Software Engineering forum of the StackExchange platform, aiming to build an annotated dataset containing cloud architectural discussions and to understand the current discussion on sustainability in cloud architecture. To identify these discussions, we first put together a list of terms indicating sustainability as the topic. Our initial findings indicate practitioners mainly focus on design aspects (analysis, synthesis, and implementation) while avoiding complex activities like evaluation and maintenance. Technical sustainability is emphasized, while the economic dimension has the most discussions exclusively focused on it. This contrasts with previous academic literature, which highlighted environmental sustainability.