Presentation from JAOO 09 Australia on how to design software architectures to maxmise sustainable outcomes by limiting power and resource usage. Uses the Virtualisation Maturity Model (see Architecture Journal edition 18).

1. Sustainable Architecture Design
Kevin Francis
Object Consulting

2. What this is all about ...

3. Agenda
 The case for Sustainable Architecture Design
 Finding improvements through design
 Finding improvements through development
 Finding improvements through architecture
 The virtualisation maturity model
 Conclusion

4. Where does the carbon come from?
Carbon Emissions
Energy
Other

5. Who’s bad?
6
5
4
Airline Industry
3 IT Industry
2
IT Industry
1
Airline Industry
0
% of Carbon Growth
Emmissions

6. Life cycle emissions of a computer

7. Facts
 Power costs for each server are now greater than
the cost of the server – Google.
 Running a computer is worth 4x the CO2 emissions
of building it, each year.
 Building a computer is 10x less effective on CO2
emissions than white goods.

8. The wake-up call

9. So where are we now?
 Architecture is directly related to power
consumption
 This stuff matters now and will matter more and
more
 Applications have never been designed efficiently
until now
 It isn’t that hard – we just haven’t thought about it
before

10. Design

11. Finding improvements through design
 Inefficient processes
 Wasted travel:
• Reduce deliveries and flights
• Enable telecommuting
• An exponential effect...
 Wasted paperwork
 Unnecessary filing
 Build the total cost of operations into the business
case
 Design systems to remove inefficiencies

12. Development

13. Support the OS and hardware
 Don’t stop sleep mode.
 Restore gracefully from sleep mode.
 Don’t hog the network, disk or processor – allow for
graceful power-down
 Even support wake-up on interrupt
 Principle: Support power saving mode:

14. Data matters too
 Disks need power
 Online data needs disks
 Principle: Store as little data as possible.
 Principle: Include data archiving in application
design.

15. Code efficiency matters
 CPU cycles = power
 Use multi-threading!
 Applications need to play together nicely
 The Windows 7 example!
 Principle: Design, develop, and test to maximize
the efficiency of code

16. Architecture
The Virtualisation Maturity Model

17. Let’s be friends 
 The power realities of CPU usage and hardware
 Step 1: Consolidate applications by function
 Step 2: Consolidate applications by server
 Step 3: Consolidate shared services
 Enterprise Architecture does save money!
 Component reuse does have a real purpose after
all.

18. Level 1 - Principles
 Principle: Develop a plan to rationalize your
applications and platform portfolio first.
 Principle: Consolidate applications together onto a
minimum number of servers.

19. The Case for Virtualisation
 Virtualisation can save hardware on paper.
 In real life it is more complicated...
 Perform consolidation first!
 Carefully design the virtual environment.
 Move consolidated machines to virtual servers.
 Group applications by:
• Usage
• Availability by time
• Availability by business need

20. Level 2: Principles
 Principle: Consolidate before virtualisation.
 Principle: Virtualise for efficiency, not for the sake
of it.

21. The Brighter Shade of Green: The Cloud
 Clouds come in many flavours:
• Software as a Service (SaaS)
• Software + Services (S+S)
• Cloud Platforms
 Clouds come in shades of green:
• Virtualised platforms (Amazon)
• Cloud Platforms (Azure and Google)

22. Making sure your Cloud has a Green Lining
 Things to look for:
• Compute platforms are better than virtualised
• Match need to platform: architecture
• Select vendor by green credentials: data centre
location, power sources
 The rest of the model still applies to Cloud
 What isn’t Green:
• “Private Clouds”
• Local Hosting

23. Level 3: Principles
 Principle: Use SaaS for commodity services
 Principle: Re-use S+S Services where possible
 Principle: Don’t virtualise new applications
 Principle: Pragmatically move applications to the
Cloud
 Principle: Choose cloud vendors by green
credentials

24. The Virtualisation Maturity Model

25. Q & (hopefully) A
Object Consulting operates a Sustainability Practices with
solutions including Sustainable Architecture Design
www.objectconsulting.com.au
Kevin Francis
kevin.francis@objectconsulting.com.au
http://msmvps.org/blogs/architecture