---
title: How Do You Build Green Software Applications? — Panel at IIITB Hyderabad
type: talk
date: 2025-03-13
topics: ["green-software"]
summary: A panel discussion around the Net Zero Act at IIITB Hyderabad, and a session on building green software applications — practical strategies to embed sustainability into every phase of development, from design to deployment.
media_url: "https://youtu.be/IwKpsBoU674"
draft: false
---

I joined a panel discussion around the Net Zero Act at IIITB Hyderabad, followed by my session, "How Do You Build Green Software Applications?" — the recording is above.

## Software's place in net zero

Net-zero commitments are usually discussed in terms of energy grids, transport, and industry. But software quietly sits underneath all of them: it decides how much compute is provisioned, where workloads run, how much data is stored and moved, and how often hardware is replaced. If software is part of the footprint, it must be part of the plan — and that was the thread connecting the panel to the session.

## What green software means

Green software is software designed to minimize energy use and environmental impact during its lifecycle. The important word is *designed* — sustainability is not a property you add at the end, and it's not only about writing efficient code. It's about making conscious choices across architecture, infrastructure, data, and operations.

## Across the lifecycle

The session walked through what those choices look like at each phase:

- **Design** — question the requirement before optimizing the implementation: what does the user actually need, how fresh must the data be, and does this feature justify the compute it will consume?
- **Architecture** — right-size services and models to the task, prefer efficient patterns over defaults, and design for high utilization rather than idle headroom.
- **Infrastructure** — choose regions and platforms with cleaner energy, let workloads be carbon-aware where timing is flexible, and retire what isn't earning its energy.
- **Data** — store what has a purpose, set lifecycles so data expires instead of accumulating, and minimize movement: transferring data costs energy just as storing it does.
- **Operations** — measure continuously (this is where standards like the Software Carbon Intensity specification help), make the footprint visible to the teams who can change it, and treat reduction as an ongoing engineering loop, not a one-time audit.

The encouraging message for the students and practitioners in the room: none of this requires exotic tooling to begin. It starts with awareness, a few measurements, and the discipline to keep asking whether each layer of the system is earning its impact.

Thank you to IIITB Hyderabad for hosting the discussion and for the engaged questions from the audience.