The impact of web applications

Most of the energy cost that websites and applications consume comes through electricity, so we could just kick back and wait for the world to switch to renewable energy right? Leave it to someone else to sort out and just carry on doing things the way we currently are?

Well, No. Not exactly. Firstly, we're not there yet in terms of sustaining 100% renewable energy at a national scale, so anything we can do to both slow the consumption of fossil fuels and reduce overall energy consumption generally is a positive thing. Secondly, there are other costs aside from just the electricity spend, costs such as increased e-waste that our applications may be indirectly (or directly) contributing to. Adopting a more environmentally friendy approach to creating web applications carries many other benefits aside from helping to conserve Earth's resources.

As web developers and digital professionals, we are in a unique position to help reduce the energy footprint caused by our industry. Typically, much of the blame for emissions is aimed at data centers, but we as developers do share in that responsibility because it is our applications that they are hosting. Because there is a direct correlation between the energy impact of digital services and the number of users/visitors that those services receive, a single good decison that we make around sustainability can propogate into huge savings on energy consumption for our applications.

This book aims to highlight some of the ways that web developers reduce the energy footprint of their applications - and the great news is that many of these techniques are simple to implement and usually come with other bonuses, such as faster page load times and cheaper hosting bills.

You may find many of the ideas to simply be common sense... and that's entirely the point. Despite these all (mostly) being well known best practices, they are still things which we regularly see skipped during application development due to the delivery pressures that most developers find themselves under, and any developer will tell you that the first thing that gets sacrificed when the pressure starts to mount is code quality. The aim of this book is to re-frame these best-practices through the lens of sustainability. We have been living in the "age of plenty" with regards to data and compute, and have had the luxury of not really having to worry about how much data we use - what this book is suggesting is that we should pivot towards thinking about the energy cost of every piece of our applications and shift to using our skills responsibly.

Because "sustainabile engineering" is largely synonymous with "good engineering", you'll hopefully find that you're already hitting many sustainability beats with your applications already just by being an awesome developer. With any luck, you will also find some more ideas that will inspire you to make your web application even more environmentally friendly.

This is not about making developers feel guilty for every byte of data they use or every CPU cycle they consume, nor is it about shaming anyone or telling them what they should or should not be doing in their application - It's simply about making energy usage a conscious part of our software development process - and getting started may be a lot easier than you think.