The tech sector has a colossal environmental impact - it's estimated to have carbon footprint similar to all of shipping worldwide, or all of aviation, or if you prefer to think in terms of countries, about the same as Germany.

Fortunately, with digital products, there are clear steps you can take to affect carbon emissions the infrastructure you control - your platform.

We offer architectural consulting to help you green your stack and choose the best green suppliers, and performance engineering to help make the most of the infrastructure you do use.

You burn less cash, emit less carbon.


Benefits

When you invest in making a digital product greener at the platform level, a few good things happen:

  • you burn less cash on wasted compute - when you understand your options for matching the capacity you provision, to the demand you see in you services, it's easier to spend less money on unused infrastructure. You make the best use of the computer you buy.
  • you emit less carbon - when you understand how to use compute in a greener way, through smart provisioning, or smarter choice of provider, you end up with lower carbon emissions, you can measure and manage over time
  • you demonstrate the leadership that attracts talent - we all want to know we're working productively and sustainably. When you're part of the solution to the challenges we face on climate, it's easier to attract the best people to your teams

How we work with you

Architectural  consulting

Architecture consulting usually consists of us getting a good understanding of your business model, how your current 'stack' of technology supports how you do valuable work, and how well it does this.

Together, we map out your stack, using tried and tested approaches, like the C4 model, and Wardley Mapping, to help your team carry out a review.

This lets you have discussions about how to improve it, and identify points where changes would provide a tangible, measurable benefit, in terms of financial costs, carbon emissions, and straight-up business value.

Performance engineering

Where your team doesn't have the capacity in-house yet, we provide performance engineering to realise the benefits identified from an architectural review.

These range from helping you speed up that `/cart` endpoint that slows down your customers, or tweaking database indices to deliver search results with less load on your infrastructure so you need less over time, to replacing long running, mostly idle servers with serverless alternatives, so you only pay for the queries you run, or the responses you serve.

Performance engineering is usually done in collaboration with your engineering team, either on-site or remote.

Our expertise

After working with a range range of tech stacks, our main expertise lies with using Python and Ruby, and Javascript, to solve problems at an application and infrastructure level.

Also, as it has evolved to fit a growing range of domains, we have invested in building deep expertise in applying modern SQL to making the most of your data, in readable, maintainable and performant ways.

This ranges from working in single device issues with open source tools like SQLite where resources are constrained, to more common query optimisation work with PostgresSQL, to applying modern SQL to work in specific domains like time series, internet of things-type data with TimeScaleDB, or massively scale-out, big data scenarios with Citus DB.

In all cases, we help you understand the trade-offs you make, in terms of operational simplicity, carbon reductions and cost, when you choose to run infrastructure yourself, or with external providers.

Let's work together

Sound good? Get in touch and drop us line.