How is sustainability covered in main tech conferences? 

Sure cybersecurity, DevOps, or anything related to SRE, is covered at length. Not to mention AI… But what room is left for the environmental impact of our job ? And what are the main trends which are filtered out from specialized conferences in Green IT such as Green IO, GreenTech Forum or eco-compute to generic Tech conferences? 

To talk about it Gaël Duez sat down in this latest Green IO episode with Erica Pisani who was the MC of the Performance and Sustainability track at QCon London this year. Together they discussed: 

And much more!

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Erica Pisani (00:01)

Think sustainable technology is inherently performant for the most part. And I think that those two things actually they're pretty well associated with each other.

Gaël Duez (00:12)

Hello everyone, welcome to Green IO! I'm Gael Duez and in this podcast, we empower responsible technologists to build a greener digital world, one bite at a time. Twice a month on a Tuesday, guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches, enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability.

How is sustainably covered in main tech conferences? Sure, cybersecurity, DevOps and its DORA metrics or anything related to SRE is covered at length. Did I forget to mention AI? Not anymore. But what room is left for the environmental impact of our what are the main trends, which are filtered out from specialized conferences like Green IO or Ecocompute to non-specialized conferences, the big tech conferences. And to talk about it, I'm delighted today to have Erica Pisani with us. So Erica lives in Canada, Toronto, software engineer in a FinOps company. And when she doesn't work, she enjoys playing violin and working in the woods with her dog, which might give us hints on why she eventually managed to be the MC of the Performance and Sustainability track at QCon London this year. So I'm really glad to have you on the show Erica and that's going to be a great debrief that we're going to have.

Erica Pisani (01:42)

Yeah, thank you so much for having me here. I'm super excited to join Green IO.

Gael Duez (01:47)

You're more than welcome. So, Erica, how did you end up being the MC of the Performance and Sustainability Track at QCon London this year? And please share with us the long version where you explain how you started to get interested in IT sustainably in the first place and is there any, I don't know, maple syrup involved? Yeah, I know it's terrible cliche. Go for it.

Erica Pisani (02:07)

No, no, I do love maple syrup. Unfortunately, it's not necessarily part of the story. But I guess the longer story is I originally, so the punchline, guess here is I came to sustainability in software development through edge computing. And really I started looking at edge computing because I just didn't know what the heck it was. A couple of years ago, every like cloud provider from, and I was working at Netlify at the time, every cloud provider from Netlify to Versal and Cloudflare and like AWS that were going on and on about compute power being available at the edge, data being available at the edge. My coworkers were so excited about edge functions launching and I straight up had no idea what they were talking about. And for me, the best way for me to learn stuff is to try and learn it as if I was gonna teach it, which is that age old advice. So to motivate myself to learn about Edge, I ended up deciding on a whim to pitch a lightning talk of I'm gonna talk about the Edge and I'm gonna talk about why it's important and exciting for software developers. No sustainability component in it whatsoever. It was just I wanted to learn more about it. And fortunately it got picked up because it was this huge thing. And I got extremely lucky that through the great vine of conferences, my talk got the attention of a member of the programming committee at QCon in 2023. so I go to QCon London and I can't remember what the track was at the time, but there was a sustainability track there at the time and Sarah Bergman was speaking. And I remember going to see her talk and I'm sitting there and I can't remember the name of the talk exactly, but she's, talking about the different scopes and the stuff that you see in the building green software book. And as I'm sitting watching her talk about this, I realized that the edge that I'd been focusing on for so long could actually play a part in the sustainability, sustainable tech movement. And so I ended up completely overhauling my talk because I was just like, just want to focus on learning more about sustainability in tech and how this can tie in and we can leverage it in this really amazing way. And I got so excited that like for me, felt like one of those turning points in how I view my career where I wanted to start looking through how I build software through that lens a lot more seriously. And because I was so excited about this, another programming committee member maybe about a year later because she kept hearing me talk about, and we kept in touch just because we met at the conference, got along. and she's like, so we have another like sustainable track that's going to be a QCon. And at that time I had been doing a few different conferences and was kind of tapped out. I was, I needed a break. So she's like, you don't have to do it this year, but consider it maybe for next year. And so, you know, 2025 Qcon London is about to roll around and she asked again like would you be interested and I was like I'm recovered I am ready to go let's do this and so that's how I ended up hosting the track this year.

Gael Duez (05:26)

Excellent. That's really, really cool to kickstart with something you don't know and having this approach like I want to teach about it to make sure that I understand about it, which is I must admit a bit of my approach as well. Like I love ending up teaching pretty fast when I'm investigating a new field because that's the only way to actually put your brain is not always purely backed by science or research papers. So yeah, I got you on this one.

Erica Pisani (06:00)

Yeah, and I don't know about you, but for me, sometimes when I'm in a rush to solve a problem, I sometimes hand wave over things I don't understand and just keep going. And when you have when you force yourself to like, okay, someone's going to ask this question, you have to understand why it's behaving in this particular way. It's so much better in the long run, but it's definitely always tempting to skip when you're when you just want to get the shiny thing working.

Gael Duez (06:14)

Absolutely. Yeah. And it's especially true when you've got some momentum in the field, like in green IT or IT sustainability at the moment, where there are more and more. And that's the good news. There are more and more people getting involved, talking about it, posting about it. mean, my LinkedIn be read the entire, the eight hours nonstop with this sort of constant media production, we tend to forget about the longer form of thinking, which is reading a book or preparing a course. And that helps actually to structure much more the topics you're investigating rather than just, I've heard about him. I've heard about her. she read. She did something amazing. She said something amazing. But at the end, how do you connect all the dots is really missing. That's my feeling when I'm reading too much of my LinkedIn feed, which is, guess, the only social network that I'm still active in.

Erica Pisani (07:12)

Yeah, no, I understand. And even just like all the newsletters available out there too. It's very overwhelming.

Gael Duez (07:16)

Yeah, wow. Oops. And I play guilty for the green eye one, but it's a monthly only. It's a monthly only. I choose the rhythm for the reason.

Erica Pisani (07:24)

It's one of the few that's like gone through my, what's the word now, my frequent like just purges of my newsletter inbox. It's managed to stay the test of time.

Gael Duez (07:32)

Yeah. That's a good test. Erica, let's talk a bit about QCon this year in April it was. Were you also in charge of sourcing, finding the speakers?

Erica Pisani (07:51)

Yeah, I was asked to be a track host. So QCon London happened in end of March, beginning of April, and I had to start doing my like, my research and reaching out in September, October of 2024. so kind of had the themes, I could make of it what I would. And I was responsible for almost creating the story that I wanted to tell in the context of performance and sustainability through the speakers that I was selecting. There were some restrictions because budgetary reasons for conferences, like on geographies. And obviously, they're hosted in London. They want to see some folks that are based in that tech community. But otherwise, the conference was really great for track hosts like myself to find who we wanted and invite them in.

Gael Duez (08:42)

That's a pretty prestigious name. I guess when you reach out to someone, say, hey, would you consider talking to QCon and submitting a talk, usually the door doesn't slam on your face like, wow. Excellent. So that being said, what were the top trends you witnessed in green IT? within your

Erica Pisani (08:53)

I'm not gonna lie, it was very helpful to be able to say I was coming from CubeCon London.

Gael Duez (09:11)

Sustainability and performance track in QCon London, but also feel free to elaborate a bit on the bigger conference. It's just that I'm not 100 % sure that you had the time to actually enjoy the rest of the conference, so I don't want to push you out of your conference zone thinking, oh well, I read the program, but that's pretty much it.

Erica Pisani (09:29)

I know I honestly, I was very glad my track was the first day because after the first day I was zonked. I can't imagine doing two days of a conference and then having to host the track. I'll start with the general theme of, guess, the wider conference from what I was able to pick out. Obviously AI is the thing right now. A lot of people are talking about AI's impact on the tech world, on the wider world. There was...

Gael Duez (09:34)

Can you imagine? That's a different story.

Erica Pisani (09:55)

Someone who, if I remember correctly, was giving a keynote even just like on design and how design is kind of being impacted in positive and negative ways with AI. There was a significant number of talks that talked about AI and if it wasn't the main feature, it was at least touched on and referenced on how it was impacting the topic that was being discussed. But would say there was still a good variety of topics being spoken about at the conference. It wasn't so dominating that it was just like QCon have become an AI conference. was just it because it's playing such a large part in software right now and has been for a couple of years. is understandably taking a lot of space in people's minds and there's a lot of questions. And so there's a lot of speakers that are stepping to the plate to talk about how AI is affecting things in different ways.

Gael Duez (10:28)

Yeah, AI-con.

Erica Pisani (10:47)

In terms of the themes of the performance and sustainability track, one of the themes that I would say, so in terms of the talks that were selected, they covered different things in general. I want to kind of talk about how you advocate maybe for sustainability initiatives at a leadership level, because one of the common questions that would come up from audience members is how do you get buy-in from the wider organization? There's a lot of software developers who listen about, yes, this does matter. We know it's important, but we still have to tell business leaders something to be able to take the time to experiment with gathering metrics, understanding what metrics do we need to gather. ⁓ As Sarah has mentioned before, I think in one of your recent episodes for Green IO, sometimes it's not entirely precise and that can be difficult to get buy-in for if it's not like you have a hundred percent certainty that these metrics are going to give you a clear picture of, let's say the carbon emissions of your software stack. And so one theme was like, okay, how do you get, how at it as an organization leader or organizational leader, how do you get buy-in from the wider organization and start adopting more sustainability practices so that you can move in the direction that you want to move? Obviously I had an AI feature there, so had someone come and talk about how to develop AI in more resource constrained environments. AI most of the time is talking about developing big LLMs with massive amounts of data. And obviously it's well known about AI's energy consumption. So I wanted to have someone be able to speak to how do you make AI performant in a smaller scale, which means that it's more sustainable.

Gael Duez (12:15)

Yeah. Was the speaker, Okay?

Erica Pisani (12:30)

Jade Abbott. So she is the CTO of Lolata AI and she's based out of South Africa and as she talks, I know the talk isn't quite, it's not live to the public yet, but she talks a little bit about how South Africa has unique constraints environment-wise. Like you can't depend on constant running electricity to be running these big, or training these large language models ⁓ for let's say like, you know, two weeks straight. So it was a really interesting talk to hear how to build those things. And then local first software is not just within a sustainability perspective, but in general, it's becoming more interesting across the board because it's a very performant way to build software. ⁓ And so that was something that we were able to highlight in this track. And obviously Sarah was on the talk and talking about, or on the track and was talking about metrics and how to gather that information. That's also a question people often have is how do information to be able to take action on it because you can't act on something that you can't measure and move toward a better outcome.

Gael Duez (13:37)

Did she talk about the observability versus good old metrics debate?

Erica Pisani (13:42)

Yes, yes she did. Yes, a little bit. She got like a lot of great stuff in the 40 minutes that she had. ⁓ And I'm actually excited when the recordings come out to rewatch it again because obviously there's so much information you take in a conference.

Gael Duez (14:00)

So you mentioned the buy-in being one of the main topic. What would be the two, three, four main insights that you've got from these different talks? So Sarah's talk, ⁓ who else was actually talking about the buy-in, the C-level buy-in?

Erica Pisani (14:16)

Ludi. And I wanted Ludi's, yeah, because she had experienced decarbonizing tech stacks ⁓ at one of her companies whose name I forget at the moment.

Gael Duez (14:20)

Ludi, yeah, obviously Ludi, yeah. Loomi My daughter's got one so that's pretty easy. It's a story box.

Erica Pisani (14:33)

Okay. Thank you. Hahahaha! Okay. That's really cool. So yeah, that was like probably the largest theme. And from there, it's like how to have more sustainable AI, how to develop more sustainable software. those were, think that like the big themes that came out of that track and that there were often a lot of questions about.

Gael Duez (14:57)

Okay. So now I'm going back to my previous questions. How can we get some buy-in? What were the main insights shared by Ludy and Sarah and some other speakers? Do you recall some vivid examples of things to do or not to do, actually?

Erica Pisani (15:17)

Well in, in Sarah's talk, she, and I, I realize it's, ⁓ it can, it can sometimes be a bit of a challenge to do this, but be okay with accepting the use of proxy metrics that are perhaps not perfect. And I think even to ask business leaders to do this is obviously a bit of a, is a bit of a challenge or like organizational leaders is a bit of a challenge, but even as a, speaking as a software engineer to have to take metrics that I know are not completely accurate is a bit challenging even for me to sit with. I think she made a very good point that it's better to have at least something that's somewhat approximate and close to what we want, and at least be able to somewhat measure it and improve it over time than to be completely blind as to what the state of the software stack is in terms of our sustainability initiatives, if we have them, or if we have certain concrete ones in the organization. And for getting buy-in,

Gael Duez (16:01)

And measure the evolution.

Erica Pisani (16:14)

Ludie, think really accurately summed it up or one of her great points anyway, was that it is a business risk ⁓ to just gloss this over. The weather is becoming increasingly unpredictable. Data centers are not necessarily going to be safe from these massive, seemingly once in a generation storms that seem to be coming every year. And taking that seriously now, even starting to get in the mindset of we need to think about this. I think it's only a matter of time and I think there's some, can't necessarily quote the specific regulations and stuff like that, but governments are starting to make it a regulatory thing. so regulatory considerations are something every business pays attention to anyway. So if you're getting on the right foot now, it makes it far less painful in the future because this this is going to come.

Gael Duez (17:06)

Interesting this resiliency approach because it goes so much against our culture in the tech space at the moment which is like you know there is no limit sky is a limit which is actually true sky is limited it's called the greenhouse gas emissions in the sky is the the blood limit but that's a different yeah but that's a different that's a different issue

Erica Pisani (17:21)

The literal limit,

Gael Duez (17:31)

I think it's good that we have these talks and people speaking up on these and maybe rebounding on what happens around us. Like what happened in Spain and Portugal should be a wake-up call to pretty much everyone running a 24-7 infrastructure because suddenly you can have no electricity. For the moment, backup generator are available for everyone, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, But hey, for how long and what is the cost actually to running all of this?

Erica Pisani (18:00)

Yeah, and at least closer to home for me, we had some terrible wildfires over the past number of years. Wildfire season starts increasingly earlier and earlier every year. ⁓ And I think probably the most memorable thing that happened with that wildfire season was a few years ago when the smoke from the wildfires in Canada were blanketing New York, and it seemed like an eerie Mars-like situation. ⁓

Gael Duez (18:00)

It makes a lot of sense. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that was crazy. And not so fun fact, I use in quite a lot of my public talks now, the white fire in Canada to get some proportion from people and I'll ask them what is the size of the country that is equivalent to the burnt area from these white fires? And people that don't imagine, proper answer is Nepal. then when you put it like, you know, the Nepal map on the average European country or the average even US state, it's pretty big. Suddenly, you're like, oh my god, this is insane. But the problem is it's often pushed back as some ecological concern, And the connection with our tech world is not made that much. This is why all this water stress, for data centers, or energy stress becomes that much important. And you mentioned another trend that you nurtured in your track, was efficiency, software efficiency, running software with less energy. I guess Holly Commons talked about cloud zombies, were there other insights also? And what did she mention also?

Erica Pisani (19:30)

Yeah. So obviously the zombie server thing is a good one. ⁓ Another one being that if I think that I'm gonna be paraphrasing here, but like efficiency is there's a limit to efficiency. There is a limit to how, and I think this is even worth noting in the sustainability context because we may take the idea that we may need to run fewer servers at a much higher degree of like utilization to help ensure that we reduce the amount of carbon emissions that we have. And there's a fine balance there where if you were to run servers maybe at too high of an efficiency, and the example that Holly had given was that of like a combustion engine, a car. There's a theoretical maximum efficiency that it has, but it's designed to run at far lower than that threshold because you don't want to wear the engine out. And similarly, that's something that we have to consider when we're trying to like resource capacity plan where we want to make sure we have enough servers to handle the amount of traffic, not as low as like, what was the quote that maybe like 12 to 18 percent of the capacity of a server's use that's obviously way too low. But we can't necessarily be at 90 to 100 percent because now we might be running the risk that our carbon emissions are related to the embodied carbon cost of having to replace our hardware frequently. And she also tied it back really well to just even like humans working way too hard all the time and needing to still take time to rest. And I think that's something that is important in a world like ours where we are trying to build more sustainable software in a world that is increasingly getting hotter. And it can sometimes feel like we need to work.

at 100 % all the time to get closer to that. But I Holly's talk in that it also reminds you to rest a little bit, take care of yourself because you can't be running at 100 % all the time.

Gael Duez (21:20)

Do we need all of this? And all of this that far and that fast. That's super interesting what you've mentioned because it connects with two dots. first of all, what Holy Mansion is really literally backed by science and researches such as I know that I'm quoting him a lot, but

Erica Pisani (21:35)

Yes.

Gael Duez (21:52)

Professor PS Lee in Singapore was like this big expert on water cooling and really study the impact on hardware of how you manage a data center in tropical area. He has provided me tons of feedback and that was one of his feedback. The hardware, it has some sort of a sweet spot for running operations. And even if it's not like the max capacity, sold by the hardware providers, actually, above a certain threshold, you're really as you say, you're significantly decreasing its lifespan. So obviously, increasing the emission via the embodied carbon, because you will have to replace sooner the gear. And so that was really connecting in my mind when you mentioned it.

Erica Pisani (22:39)

Yeah.

Gael Duez (22:41)

And it also connected to something else that we should be cautious about all this talk about how much energy we waste or how much server capacity we waste. know, in Green IO Singapore this year, we had this talk from, this AWS software engineer. He was showing this graph of how unused capacities on average you could find on a standard AWS server, And I think we should be very cautious about this theoretical number and it might be proven way lower in true operational condition. And back to the track itself, about?

Erica Pisani (23:27)

One of the, I think, things that was really exciting about the, like, just hosting the track too, is seeing, there seemed to be like this effect where as more people came to the different talks and people started hearing about the different topics that were in the track, there was increasingly higher amounts of people coming to the track as the day went on. And it seemed like a lot of folks...

Gael Duez (23:41)

Okay.

Erica Pisani (23:53)

We're really excited and really engaged. And I think that that's really encouraging to see that when folks are aware of the sustainability stuff that we can work on in tech that we have available to us, it seems like it's more we know what we want, we need to do, and we have some ideas of what we can do, and it's just a matter of executing on it. People are really excited to take that back to their organizations and start adopting it themselves. I know sometimes you see some talks where folks just don't know what to ask, but that's not what I saw at QCon. Everyone was super keen, which I love to see, and that made me really excited for my speakers as well, because I'm glad that they got to see just how excited people were about sustainable tech.

Gael Duez (24:44)

and having a lot of questions is always a very good sign for a speaker, that's for sure. And actually, it connects with a question I wanted to ask you, all this momentum and people showing up more and more over the day, because I was wondering, why did you choose to name your track Sustainably and Performance? And was it the only angle performance to attract devs attention? Was it like if you had mentioned only sustainly or green IT, was it not enough? What is your explanations for this choice?

Erica Pisani (25:21)

well, I have to admit, I didn't get to necessarily call the track that like it came in as performance and sustainability. I can make some tweaks to it, but for the most part, it was like, we have this idea that we would like this track to be this. do you feel comfortable playing together a track for this? And I think though, that it was well named because I think.

Gael Duez (25:25)

Okay. Okay.

Erica Pisani (25:43)

Like performance is something that a lot of software developers usually, that's often the stuff that they're running into in their day-to-day works and something that's very front of mind. They're dealing with like too slow of an application in this respect or ⁓ this database isn't responding well in this capacity. And so they're looking for solutions and ideas on how they can tackle the performance challenges that they maybe have and their organization, or they're anticipating that there will be challenges and want to know ahead of time. That being said, think sustainable technology is inherently performant for the most part. And I think that those two things actually they're pretty well associated with each other. And I thought I'd like, as I was building the track that angle I thought was very important to me because you the best of both worlds in this sense. You can look to build performance software and by looking to build performance software, you can work toward creating a more sustainable future with the tech that you're building. And I didn't want it to seem like you had to pick either or. There is a lot of opportunities for both. was also why I really doubled down on that title for the track.

Gael Duez (26:56)

Yeah, makes sense. Anyway, if this is a wording that would attract people, I think you made a really good choice to use it to make sure that your room is full and then they got exposed to great content. If the room is empty, mean, that's pointless to have like the most technical possible talk on sustainability in scope one and two and three and four and what not. I got your point.

Erica Pisani (27:18)

Yeah, but it is good even just to have a, almost like if you can envision the software that you ultimately have at the end of the day that happens to be sustainable and ultimately I want to see a sustainable future and so it's a little bit like I'm pulling that messaging in a bit. I think it makes it more real for people. It doesn't feel like an abstract theory.

Gael Duez (27:26)

I completely got it. I've got a question. I'm always curious about what is mentioned when people are talking about sustainability and planetary boundaries and the likes. Was it like mostly about carbon and energy or where other environmental impacts such as water, resource exhaustion, et cetera, et cetera, also mentioned?

Erica Pisani (28:02)

⁓ Water resources and stuff like that was mentioned in the talks themselves. Holly both called that out specifically in their talks. For the folks that were on the other side, the attendees, they tended to think more in terms of the energy.

Gael Duez (28:09)

Okay.

Erica Pisani (28:18)

Not to say that they weren't thinking also about the water usage and stuff like that, but I think usually when folks were asking questions, it was more like, want to reduce the energy consumption of my data center to reduce my emissions more than it's consuming X liters of water every day.

Gael Duez (28:34)

Which makes sense because this is their main proxy metrics to act like on day one. If you decide to migrate your cloud or even to do like carbon aware computing, it requires the DevOps and the Ops and sometimes the SysAdmin to be put in the loop and it's a longer game and QoCon being really focused on Dev and DevOps, starting with energy makes a lot of what you shared is very positive news because I remember that three years ago in main tech conference just talking about energy savings was really a Revolution and now if it goes beyond and some talks mention also water That's a very positive sign. Okay

Erica Pisani (29:16)

Yeah, and even those metrics, like we're getting better at tracking them, but Ludie called out in her talk, like it can be difficult to get really concrete measurements sometimes on that alone. And so if we're looking to gather more information on, let's say, water usage, that's going to be something that we'll have to advocate for with our cloud providers to start giving us more information in that respect as well.

Gael Duez (29:23)

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. makes lot of sense. Okay, so Erica, thanks a lot for the wrap-up of this five talks at QCon London. Can I ask you one last, maybe two last questions? What's next for you in the Sustainably Area, of course?

Erica Pisani (29:48)

Of course. There's a few different things I'd like to look at on the side for myself. I've had a few different ideas kicking in my head, partially inspired by some of the talks I'd seen at QCon and just from following other folks in the field. One of them being because I, in my role right now at the financial tech company, we use Django, which is like a framework that's been around for ages. And I can't remember who the person was on Blue Sky that kind of gave me this friendly nudge, but there was this whole discussion happening in a Django forum of people trying to figure out how to best measure like carbon emissions or energy usage of Django apps. And there wasn't necessarily some good consensus on it. And so that's something that I'm hoping to take a look at at some point with what free time I have. ⁓ And then otherwise I'm still just trying to learn from everyone else right now. And what I am learning and at least having some ideas about it and blogging about. So that's kind of what's next for me right now.

Gael Duez (30:41)

Okay, interesting sense. And you mentioned resources and stuff that you've learned. Would you like to share with the audience your main sources of information, except for QCon London, obviously, this year?

Erica Pisani (31:11)

Yeah, I really like following the folks at the Green Software Foundation. Sometimes I'll take a look at, they have working groups that are looking at like developing papers on let's say recently, I think they did a working group on AI and I'm just interested in seeing what they're thinking of in terms of developing more sustainable AI. I also like following, I don't know his last name, but his first name is Wilco and he's very active in. Yes. So he's someone that I follow and just like pay attention to as well as, yeah, and Sasha Luciani, even though I don't work in AI, I still love listening to, or not necessarily listening to, but what she writes, I tend to read as well. And then I listen to Green IO, which is also how I've been getting some of my information.

Gael Duez (31:43)

He's amazing. Yeah, thanks a lot. Okay, thanks a lot for this. And maybe to close the podcast on our usual positive piece of news, would you like to share something? I know that you're based in North America, so it's not that easy at the moment, but would you like to share a positive piece of news regarding sustainability or life in general? I don't know. ⁓

Erica Pisani (32:12)

Yeah, sure. Like I mentioned before, I got like really interested in edge computing. I like I've gone deep down that rival hole of understanding more about how people are investing it and how it's growing over the years. And I think something that's got me really excited, and that makes me like, I consider a wonderful piece of good news is that as more distributed computing, obviously distributed computing is a thing already, but as it gets more adopted in an edge computing sense, there's really cool opportunities for things like smaller edge data centers incorporated into maybe urban environments where the data centers can heat buildings. And by being able to be used in that way, we can actually significantly reduce carbon emissions of heating buildings, which is a major, major source of carbon emissions. And that, I don't know why I'm nerding out so much about that, but I think that's an amazing piece of news, especially being in a colder climate like Canada.

Gael Duez (33:13)

Yeah, I was about to say that in tropical area, that's kind of the opposite. what do you do with this extra heat? And, know, to bounce back on what you said, this edge computing and this CDN stuff and all of the likes is really something that I'm trying to investigate more and more because on one hand, yes, it can be the case at having, you know, less network to travel through, we can reduce somehow not the immediate environmental footprint of data because it has almost zero elasticity, but the would say midterm long term sizing of the overall network. it makes sense like to have computing capacity closer to the end user. But on the other end, if you look at how the world is decarbonizing, there are huge gaps. And I'm always wondering, if I'm going to try to take a North American example, but if I've got users based in Ohio, do I really want to do edge computing in Ohio far as I remember, the grid is pretty dirty there. Rather than hosting most of my server capacity in Quebec, where I think it's one of the lowest carbon electricity grid in North America. this trade-off, I think I've never seen any article, any research paper truly embracing it and trying to tackle it. So correct me if I'm wrong. And if any listener had some research paper, please send them my way. But yeah, that's a real challenge for me. And I'm curious to hear what you have to say because you're the edge expert. like, you know, talking about it, but I've got an expert. So I'm going to ask the question to the experts.

Erica Pisani (35:09)

No, don't worry. So the question is more like how to balance like having edge data centers, let's say in dirtier grids compared to just hosting in. Yeah, no, that's a very good question. And I think I would also be very interested in this research paper should it exist. I think that is one of those things that it's gonna be one of those.

Gael Duez (35:22)

Hahaha

Erica Pisani (35:32)

Design architectural decisions because to your point, if I'm in North America and I, you know, being based in Toronto, I have this wonderful data center that is one of the greenest in the grid, not that like a four hour drive away from me. I would rather use that data center and test whether hosting stuff at the edge in Toronto makes from the reduction in the distance traveled of the request, does that make a meaningful difference to host that stuff here where we may need to be burning in the middle of winter fossil fuels to be able to supply the electricity grid? Or is it better to just rely entirely on the data center? I don't have necessarily a good concrete answer for that, but I think that there would, I would love to see there be tests done on that because depending on, I guess, the fossil fuel that's being used in that particular grid, there can be a very meaningful difference to hosting everything on the data center, not leveraging the edge, versus leveraging the edge heavily and getting the reduction in emissions from not having the request travel as far.

Gael Duez (36:41)

Agree. If you ever want to resume your studies and do a PhD, you've got a research topic. But anyway, well, thanks a lot, Erica. That was cool to do this wrap up episode about QCon. I wonder if the listeners will enjoy it as well. So please feel free to comment.

Erica Pisani (36:49)

Yeah, I have lots of material now. 

Gael Duez (37:06)

Because if so, we will do more. are other great tech conferences also that are focusing more and more on sustainability, but it was also great meeting you. I was not aware of how involved you were in the field, so I'm very glad that we connected now. So thanks a lot for joining the show.

Erica Pisani (37:21)

Thank you again so much for having me. This was a blast.

Gael Duez (37:25)

Low carbon blast. Talk to you soon, Erica.

Erica Pisani (37:27)

Low carbon blast, yes, always. You too, take care.

Gaël Duez (37:39)

Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode. Because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO, all the references mentioned in this episode, as well as the full transcript, are in the show notes. You can find these notes on your favorite podcast platform and of course on our website greenio.tech. Now, if you enjoy this interview, please take 30 seconds to give us five stars on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Sharing this episode on social media or directly with fellow software practitioners seems also a good idea, if they couldn't attend QCon this year. You got the point, being an independent media, we rely mostly on you to get more responsible technologists on board.

In our next episode, we will welcome Rainer Karcher, a pillar of the SustainableIT.org association and a climate activist in a suit, as he likes to describe himself. We will talk about the importance of not deprioritizing future readiness, which is what is the current backlash against ESG doing, and what IT and digital has to do with it. Stay tuned.

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