At Salesforce, we have ambitious climate action goals to cut our carbon emissions in half by 2030. Our technology and products represent over half of our emissions, which is why we’re taking steps to improve the efficiency of our infrastructure and our software. At an infrastructure level, Salesforce is committed to operating efficient data centers and partnering with cloud providers to sustainably leverage the scale and flexibility of Hyperforce. As software developers, there’s work we can do to use cloud computing resources more efficiently and reduce the carbon emissions associated with operating and building out new data centers.
This is why Salesforce launched Green Code earlier this year, a new initiative to help reduce carbon emissions associated with the software development lifecycle. As part of this initiative, we released the Sustainability Guide for Salesforce Technology which offers practical recommendations for designing apps and writing code that are more sustainable.
As we cover in the Guide, the way Salesforce is implemented by admins, developers, and architects has a direct impact on carbon emissions. These emissions are attributed to both Salesforce and our customers, so there’s an opportunity for us to collectively take climate action and use the platform with care for our planet. Today, we’re giving customers a new way to monitor and reduce carbon emissions through the Salesforce Platform.
Introducing the Developer Carbon Dashboard
We created the Developer Carbon Dashboard to help developers and admins become more aware of how their tools can contribute to carbon emissions and use Salesforce in an even more sustainable manner. Developers can use the dashboard to partner with their company’s sustainability team and make climate action a part of their day job.
Get started today by installing the Developer Carbon Dashboard.
The Developer Carbon Dashboard takes performance data provided by Event Monitoring and displays it with CRM Analytics. It’s an open-source project that customers can customize and adapt in their org. For this version of the dashboard, we’re looking at currently available Event Monitoring logs to display discrete parts of three different layers of the core application: business logic, UI layer, and API layer.
The dashboard highlights inefficiencies across these layers based on Salesforce’s best practices around runtime. The dashboard also shows where carbon can be saved by providing a list of application components that can be optimized.
Under the hood, the dashboard takes the CPU time logged by Event Monitoring and combines it with carbon coefficients that estimate the amount of carbon generated by the instance an org is running in. Each instance can have a unique carbon coefficient that reflects the underlying hardware it’s hosted on, the amount of carbon in the local electrical grid, and other factors. You can find the full methodology for the dashboard in our GitHub repository.
While you’re considering the carbon emissions shown in the Developer Carbon Dashboard, it’s worth putting them in context with tools like the US EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator. You might find that the carbon emitted by long-running Apex over the course of a year is equivalent to a road trip!
Climate action creates developer success
When developers architect for sustainability, they also help to architect for better experiences for their end users. For example, optimizing reports not only reduces an organization’s carbon emissions, it helps users see data faster and improve the overall performance of their org. There’s a strong link between improving performance and improving sustainability.
To learn more about Salesforce’s Green Code initiatives, check out the Green Code Quick Look Badge, the Sustainability Guide for Salesforce Technology, and the sustainability resources hub. If you’re interested in Event Monitoring or CRM Analytics, contact your Salesforce account representative for more information.
Additional resources
- 4 Ways Coders Can Fight The Climate Crisis
- Sustainability Guide for Salesforce Technology
- Salesforce Developer Podcast
- 4 Ways You Can Practice Sustainable Web Design
- Design for Sustainability Trailhead
- Green Software Foundation
- ClimateAction.Tech
About the author
Kevin Lu is a Technical Writer at Salesforce shaping software that empowers both people and the planet. His work focuses on telling stories about technology for sustainable design and development. You can follow Kevin on both Twitter and LinkedIn.