BlogATAhon2021 Entry

Continuous Performance Testing for less Carbon footprint: A thought 

by Arun Kumar Dutta

Introduction:

Off late, I was reading a lot on sustainability and carbon footprint. Basically, this is like the need of the hour. Being performance testing background, my thought process was always inclined towards relating performance testing. In this blog article, I will put my thoughts about how performance testing can be helpful for less carbon footprint which leads to better sustainability and a healthier world for all of us.

Reduced carbon footprint by conducting continuous performance testing – both on cloud and on-premises solutions:

We all know performance testing is required to ensure application speed, scalability, stability, availability, resiliency etc. Basically, performance testing is to know the application’s actual performance to ensure enhanced end-user performance and optimized on-premises server or cloud resource performance. While leveraging cloud over on premise is not only cost beneficial, it also better for sustainability with reduced carbon footprint. Yes, even on premises can also use green or clean energy. However, cloud have the flexibility to scale up or down as necessary easily which on premises data center is lagging. Even cloud is distributed across several applications and their end-users.

In one of my earlier blogs published in EuroSTAR huddle, I already put my thoughts that without continuous performance testing applications don’t run fast in the cloud. Applications deployed in the cloud will run faster only after proper performance testing, optimization, and engineering. This leads to cost savings in long run. Added thing is that it also reduces carbon footprint for optimized resource usages.

On the other hand, though traditional data center does not have flexibility to scale up or down easily, but they can always ensure optimized server resource utilization by conducting continuous performance testing and using different ways like adopting optimized resource driven high-availability concepts, application containerization etc. to ensure reduced carbon footprint. Overall, objective is to minimize wastage and optimize the resources as much as possible. And we can certainly do this by continuous performance testing, capacity planning.

Reduced carbon footprint by web performance optimization by continuous performance testing:

There is no doubt that today Internet is having the massive environmental impact. So, if we can make our web page faster with improved performance, then definitely it will be having less carbon footprint and better for our environment. Optimizing web pages is one such way to improve performance and reduce overall carbon footprint. Yes, web performance optimization is a continuous, never-ending process. Web performance optimization can be done only via continuous performance testing, monitoring, and analyzing the performance of the web application and lastly trying to improve it by performance optimization/tuning.

From now onwards, I think performance engineers and performance testers should also talk about improved performance for better carbon footprint. Web performance optimization can be done both on client and server side. The client side could be initial page load time or JavaScript that runs in the browser or downloading all the resources and many more. While server side relating to optimizing web, app or database servers or things like database queries and other application dependencies. There are many best practices that we can follow for web performance optimization like caching & content delivery network, bundle & minification of files and shrinking file sizes, optimizing usage of images and application dependencies or optimize most business-critical web pages in terms of user load and business functions or reduce the number of resources of web pages.

Continuous performance testing assists to let us know whether performance is improved or not after implementing those web performance optimization techniques/best practices. The faster the application or websites, it uses less data to serve the request and the less carbon it will omit in return. Overall, this web performance optimization by continuous performance testing leads to better carbon footprint for our environment.

Conclusion:

As a performance tester, earlier we used to talk about only improved performance. Now, we can proudly say continuous performance testing assists to not only improve performance for end-users but also for cost effectiveness and for better carbon footprint which makes our environment better sustainable. As a result of this business can be conducted for long run and brand will be created.

References:

• https://huddle.eurostarsoftwaretesting.com/applications-dont-run-fast-in-cloud-without-continuous-performance-testing/ (my blog)
• https://isg-one.com/articles/can-cloud-computing-reduce-carbon-emissions#:~:text=Studies%20indicate%20that%20cloud%20computing,energy%20on%20a%20global%20scale.&text=The%20study%20found%20Microsoft%20cloud,operations%20(per%20~1%2C000%20users)
• https://stackify.com/web-performance-optimization/
• https://atos.net/en/blog/guide-to-software-decarbonization?utm_campaign=G+-+Blog+-+decarbonization+in+applications&utm_content=&utm_medium=linkedin&utm_source=social
• https://devblogs.microsoft.com/sustainable-software/role-of-performance-engineering-techniques-in-designing-carbon-efficient-applications/
• https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2019/01/save-planet-improving-website-performance/