Green Software Metrics

Efficiency has always been at the core of software performance engineering research. Many aspects that have been addressed in performance engineering for decades are gaining popularity under the umbrella of Green IT and Green Software Engineering. Engineers and marketers in the industry are looking for ways to measure how green (in terms of carbon dioxide emissions) their software products are. Proxy measures are proposed, such as hosting cost or the power consumption of the hardware environment on which the software is running. In environments where a software system runs on a dedicated server instance, this may make sense, but in virtualised, containerised or serverless environments, it is necessary to find ways of allocating the energy consumption of the entire server to software components that share the same infrastructure. This paper proposes the use of resource demand measurements as a basis for measuring how green a given software actually is.