Green IT focuses on reducing IT’s environmental footprint, by rethinking how you build, deploy, and power IT systems. At QCon London, Ludi Akue presented how her team did a lifecycle assessment, set a 10% emissions reduction goal, simplified architecture, and optimized frontends, to align with climate goals.
It’s important to distinguish between sustainable technology and Green IT, Akue said. Sustainable technology is the broader concept, covering any technology designed to operate within planetary boundaries while supporting long-term environmental, social, and economic well-being. This includes renewable energy systems, circular economy approaches, and technologies that minimize resource consumption, she mentioned.
Green IT is more specific, focusing on reducing the environmental footprint of our digital systems and IT infrastructure, Akue said. This includes everything from energy-efficient hardware and optimized code to data center design and software architecture decisions that minimize resource use:
In my work, I focus on Green IT as a critical component of sustainable technology. The tech sector currently emits about 6% of global emissions, more than airlines, and AI could triple this impact. We’ve entered a new reality where emissions are becoming design constraints for our digital systems.
It’s no longer about small tweaks. It’s about fundamentally rethinking how you build, deploy, and power your IT systems to align with climate goals, Akue argued.
To embark successfully on a green IT journey, Akue suggested starting with clear measurement and scoping:
At my previous hardware scale-up, we began with a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) focusing on how we could directly influence Green IT.
An LCA is the common methodology for assessing the impacts of all stages of a product or service’s lifecycle. Doing an LCA, they discovered technology was one of their main emissions contributor. This gave them the direction to explore their IT equipment, such as employee desktops, laptops, and screens, as well as their production servers.
Akue mentioned that they made a concrete commitment to green IT:
Our commitment was a 10% emissions target aligned with the Paris Agreement.
Don’t get paralyzed waiting for perfect data; identifying your biggest impact areas and creating momentum matters more than precision at the start, Akue said. She also mentioned that you don’t have to do it alone, and suggested getting help from experts:
We reached out to an LCA consultant who helped us through the whole assessment, such as analyzing raw materials, comparing emission sources, and developing a sustainability roadmap.
Akue shared what she had done to implement green IT at scale. One example was to simplify their architecture, moving from microservices to a modular monolith:
I know, this might surprise readers. We had what I call a “distributed monolith” – all the complexity of microservices with none of the benefits, plus constant cross-team dependencies that were killing our velocity. The modular monolith gave us back architectural clarity and let the team focus on shipping features instead of managing infrastructure complexity.
The modular monolith eliminated significant technical debt and gave them architectural clarity, Akue said. This lets the team focus on shipping features while also reducing our resource consumption and carbon footprint. This wasn’t just technical cleanup, it improved performance while reducing resource usage, Akue mentioned.
The weight of webpages can strain user devices. It should be optimized for performance to lower emissions, as Akue explained:
We tackled frontend optimization after realizing our heavy pages were draining users’ batteries and accelerating device replacement. Through lazy loading, JavaScript trimming and static generation, we saw substantial improvements in battery life and performance.
Akue mentioned that they changed their approach to cost optimization by including environmental impact, not just our cloud costs but also the estimation of our location-based carbon emissions. For instance, the cheapest cloud region often had the highest carbon intensity, she mentioned.
By factoring in both cost and carbon intensity, we made meaningful improvements without significant cost increases, Akue concluded.
