Green Software Engineering Practices Checklist

18 items · Technical · Medium difficulty · 1 hour

Practical steps to cut cloud carbon, optimize resources, and measure software emissions.

• Set measurable sustainability goals and a carbon budget

  Define targets, timeline, and an owner to track progress.

• Prefer low-carbon cloud regions for deployments

  Use provider region metadata or carbon-aware APIs when scheduling.

• Enable resource and carbon monitoring

  Collect CPU, memory, network, energy, and emissions metrics.

• Rightsize compute instances

  Remove overprovisioning and align instance sizes with actual load.

• Collect 95th-percentile CPU and memory utilization

  Use 7–30 day windows to avoid reacting to short spikes.

• Adjust instance types and autoscaling policies based on telemetry

  Apply gradual changes and validate performance after changes.

• Prefer autoscaling over always-on instances

  Use scale-to-zero or dynamic groups to avoid idle capacity.

• Schedule batch jobs during low-carbon periods

  Shift non-urgent workloads to times of lower grid carbon intensity.

• Prune and optimize CI/CD pipelines

  Remove redundant jobs and run tests selectively by change.

• Enable job caching and incremental builds in CI

  Cache dependencies and artifacts to reduce build time and compute.

• Use CDN and edge caching to reduce origin data transfer

  Cache static assets at the edge and set long cache TTLs where safe.

• Optimize database queries and indexing

  Profile queries, add indexes, and avoid inefficient scans.

• Identify slow and high-frequency queries with profiling tools

  Use query plans, traces, and frequency counts to prioritize fixes.

• Reduce network payloads and enable compression

  Use brotli/gzip, trim JSON fields, and lazy-load large assets.

• Minimize container and artifact sizes

  Use slim base images, multi-stage builds, and remove unused libs.

• Measure Software Carbon Intensity (SCI)

  Calculate CO2e per kWh or per request using available tooling.

• Create dashboards and alerts for carbon or efficiency regressions

  Alert on rising energy use or emissions per request to catch regressions.

• Power down non-production resources when idle

  Schedule off-hours for dev/staging and delete orphaned resources.

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