Culture
June 9

Connections: The environmental cost of DevOps

More available, cheaper resources have allowed DevOps best practices to flourish. But as much as we optimize processes and pipelines against cost, how often do we consider environmental impact as its own objective?
Talk abstract

Websites used to be simple. Static pages, single environments, and infrequent pushes.

Today is a very different world. Highly available, cheap resources have allowed DevOps to flourish, but with it has come uncurtailed consumption made worse by poor performance and practices hiding beneath the surface of even the most responsible organizations. 

It can be tempting to solve performance issues and blockages with more resources, but doing so fails to get to the heart of a problem in our code. At the same time, resources everywhere make a nontrivial, continuous impact on CO2 produced. 

In this talk, we'll cover:

  • A history of advances that have brought us to highly-available containerized DevOps
  • The past, current, and projected environmental impact of our industry
  • How small changes in process and culture can influence our industry's impact in a real way