A friend of mine Denny Boynton and I were talking at TechEd last week about green computing and it started me thinking. He mentioned that he and some other architects were discussing green computing platforms (server vitalization, cloud computing,etc...). That started me talking about: What is the responsibility of the software developer in this emerging green computing grid? Many infrastructure groups over the last few years have been moving to virtual servers and environments initially to save on capital expenditures slow the ever growing demand for data center real estate.
Now after establishing the foundation for vitalization operations groups are seeing tertiary benefits form this process. Additional, justifications now include floor space reduction, reduced energy consumption, and energy savings from cooling requirements for data centers. Operational support teams are encouraging app dev teams to move their custom applications to these virtual instances and if necessary to modify applications that are not compatible to leverage this ROI for the company. The primary sales points given to App Dev teams are assurance that all servers are identical and the added speed that operations groups can scale out to support. Generally there are significant advantages to this trend towards vitalization, reduced surface space, reduced capital expense, lower maintenance cost, lower energy costs, higher reliability and scalability definitely a WIN WIN. That said how do we ensure that this continues to be a wining proposition.
What is the responsibility of the software developer in this new landscape? How can we ensure that this trend continues. I have developed and designed architecture for software for the last several decades. Over that time period I have increasingly heard comments like "we will just get more servers" and "memory is cheap" have become all to common. That along with approaches to application development that involve wide and deep data structures because "we don't want to go back to the server" for the data later, because we are lazy and don't want to make the extra call bloat our applications. Approaches and architectures like this will never preserve these new found savings we have found. We must change our approach to applications development. We should not avoid taking the extra steps necessary to ensure that we minimize our server footprint. Thoughtful design and architecture that ensures features are delivered to applications without excessive round trips to servers or the transmission of additional unnecessary data overhead are initial steps we can take. As developers should actively look to new technologies to improve user experience and reduce custom and non standard communications channels. In the .Net development space we should pursue WPF, WCF and Silverlight technologies to reduce the complexity of future applications. We should also actively review and seek opportunities to exit from legacy non mainstream Microsoft platforms. Finally, we need to proactively lobby vendors to include the features that support that enables developers to concentrate on productive business functionality and less of plumbing applications and injecting potentially faulty, difficult to maintain code that tightly ties applications to their deployment paths and infrastructure.
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