The carbon footprint of the cloud has exceeded the footprint of air travel. A move away from monolithic statically compiled binaries to constellations of microservices (usually bloated docker containers) is a significant part of the problem.
Docker's explosive growth is partly due to the convenience of the abstraction it provides, abstracting the entire linux userspace, putting even OS-wide package managers and language-specific package managers inside another box. This usually breaks any caching / code sharing that the now containerized packages had, resulting in the bloat. The docker image is portable, yes, but disk and RAM efficiency of the systems people are building are awful. It has been the norm for every little microservice to add a few GB of bloat to the overall software system. A dev writes "RUN pip install pytorch" and you have CICD servers pulling down 2GB of pytorch to build the container, every time the software is built, probably forever. Meanwhile species are going extinct and a lot of people are starting to wonder if it's ethical to work in technology at all.
What can your team do to reverse this tragedy of the commons? Can you come up with some equally ergonomic tool that can migrate the container ecosystem on to something that has a solid foundation with good caching?
Docker's explosive growth is partly due to the convenience of the abstraction it provides, abstracting the entire linux userspace, putting even OS-wide package managers and language-specific package managers inside another box. This usually breaks any caching / code sharing that the now containerized packages had, resulting in the bloat. The docker image is portable, yes, but disk and RAM efficiency of the systems people are building are awful. It has been the norm for every little microservice to add a few GB of bloat to the overall software system. A dev writes "RUN pip install pytorch" and you have CICD servers pulling down 2GB of pytorch to build the container, every time the software is built, probably forever. Meanwhile species are going extinct and a lot of people are starting to wonder if it's ethical to work in technology at all.
What can your team do to reverse this tragedy of the commons? Can you come up with some equally ergonomic tool that can migrate the container ecosystem on to something that has a solid foundation with good caching?