Microsoft Joins Forces with Accenture and Goldman on Greener Software

In a recent announcement, Microsoft Corp., Accenture Plc, and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. have stated that they are teaming up with nonprofits like the Linux Foundation and climate groups to develop and share different ways to architect software that produces fewer carbon emissions when run in data centers.  Especially the software that primarily depends on energy-hungry networks of high-powered computers that particularly consume increasing amounts of the world's electricity.

The Green Software Foundation includes Microsoft-owned GitHub and software consultancy ThoughtWorks. The foundation primarily focuses on building tools and creating standards for measuring the climate impact of software and will work on training software engineers who want to learn how to build programs that consume less energy. As software applications are growing more complex, the consumption and requirement of high computing power and electricity are also increasing, leading to calls for greater awareness of their carbon footprint.

Cloud-computing companies like Microsoft, Amazon.com Inc., and Alphabet Inc.'s Google are also focusing on reducing the emissions output of their data centers. Besides, many companies have announced carbon-neutral goals. Software developers are now being taught a new skill—green software engineering—the same way they have previously received training on preventing security fluctuations and flaws in their code.