Carbon-Aware Software Services

The significant carbon footprint of the ICT sector calls for methodologies to contain carbon emissions of running software. This article proposes a novel framework for implementing, configuring and assessing carbon-aware interactive software services based on forecasts for carbon intensity and service request rates. An open-source prototype of such framework is used to configure a software service implemented as per our methodology and assessed against traditional non-adaptive implementations of the same service. Experiments show the capability of our framework to control the average quality of output results of carbon-aware services and to reduce carbon emissions from 8% to 50%.