Time to Go Green: Carbon-Aware Request Scheduling in Software Services

The growing environmental impact of the ICT sector calls for sustainable computing, including software services designed to minimise their carbon footprint, without compromising on quality of service. In particular, software services should be carbon-aware by design - leveraging alternative configurations to reduce emissions while featuring the required quality of service. In this work, we present a carbon-aware approach to realise dynamically adaptive software services. We propose an optimisation scheme that enables serving incoming requests with different implemented versions of software services, by minimising carbon emissions, combining service adaptability and time-shifting. Finally, to demonstrate the feasibility of our proposal, we introduce CarbonShift, an open-source prototype implementation.