Microsoft and Singapore’s Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) on Tuesday ( 3 Oct 2023) unveiled a set of digital sustainability guidelines that they hope can “accelerate education and awareness among businesses and developers”.
The guidelines, created with support from the Green Software Foundation (GSF), clarify the relationships between hardware and software sustainability principles and measurements, Microsoft said.
“It provides straightforward guidance on integrating energy efficiency, carbon awareness and hardware efficiency into software engineering and development processes,” the tech giant noted. “Applying these principles ensures that applications and solutions are energy-efficient and carbon-aware by design.”
According to the guidelines, sustainable software is “carbon-efficient”, which means it emits the least carbon possible by design through code, architecture and other intentional choices.
Such applications tend to be cheaper to run, are more performant, more resilient and more optimised, all while having a positive impact on the planet, the guidelines said.
