TomasKopunec
commented
7 months ago Context
The IEF project, initiated by the Open Source Working Group at the Green Software Foundation, addresses the increasing environmental impact of software as digital transformation accelerates. It aims to tackle the unique measurement challenges presented by various computing environments, such as clouds, containers, mobile devices, and desktops. The project's focus is on reducing the friction currently associated with assessing software emissions.
Primary Objective
The key expected outcome is to extend the IEF's adaptable framework to model, measure, simulate, and monitor the environmental impact of software across multiple environments, including edge devices or other specifically selected environments. It aims to produce a versatile tool that can provide valuable insights during the software design and development phases. The tools produced by IEF will have an open-source repository and documentation to encourage community contributions and adoption.
Core Features of the System
1. Measurement Model
- Extend the IEF by developing a flexible measurement model for software environmental impact
- Extend the capabilities of the existing Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) specification to offer a flexible measurement model for software environmental impacts
- Easily calculate software impact metrics, such as carbon, water, or energy without the need for writing any code
2. Simulation Tool
- Create a simulation tool to project and analyse the environmental impact during the design phase, enabling users to make informed choices
- This feature gives users the ability to optimize their software design decisions by evaluating different scenarios, based on their budget, context, and other business constraints
- Allow users to easily change the model to represent “what if” scenarios, reducing the cost by validating different software architectures without making any changes
3. Modular Design
- Modular design will allows for the integration of custom models or selection from a range of pre-existing models, knows as plugins
- Follow the IF design philosophy that all models should be plugins, so that the configuration is as modular as possible
- Provide clear separation between the engine and models
4. Integration Capability
- Seamlessly integrate with various environments, such as cloud, bare-metal, and virtualized systems, to assess software impacts comprehensively
5. User-friendly Interface
- The design is easy-to-use, intuitive and accessible for software engineers and environmental scientists, encouraging widespread adoption
- Simple installation via yarn or npm package managers
- All that is needed, is to define the scope and parameters in a simple YAML manifest file, known as impl, the IF handles the rest
6. Compliance
- Adhere to the guidelines and objectives of the Green Software Foundation, promoting sustainability in software
The context work and any diagrams should focus on the architecture of the system as is and not the implementation we are going to do for the IEF. It should be a general explanation on how the IEF currently works and which parts it is made of so that later any team with a new implementation can use the context identified here to understand how they are gonna integrate their new solution to the current state of the IEF .