Quantifying Digital Carbon Emissions
Exploring the architecture of software illuminates the critical role of design decisions in enhancing both performance and energy efficiency. This section aims to quantify these impacts, facilitating the processes of monitoring progress and assessing strategies that have been designed to reduce the digital carbon footprint.
The challenge of measuring an application’s carbon footprint lies not just in the complexity of its various components but also in understanding their energy consumption and interactions with external systems and infrastructure, such as hosting environments. This complexity presents several challenges, including but not limited to the direct and indirect energy consumption of hardware, the efficiency of operating systems, the energy impact of data transmission through networks, and the variability in the energy efficiency of applications themselves.
To effectively navigate these challenges, adopting a layered approach...