How Eco-Friendly Java Applications Using Quarkus Contribute to Environmental Sustainability

Montevideo, July 15, 2024.

According to Greenpeace's 2017 Clicking Clean Report, the Information Technology (IT) industry accounts for 7% of global energy consumption. Companies in the IT sector have made significant commitments to prioritizing the use of renewable energy and reducing carbon emissions. Sofis Solutions, as a service company with a strong focus on custom software development, seeks to contribute to the reduction of the carbon footprint. To achieve this, it applies principles, activities, and tools throughout the software development lifecycle.

In this context, and as part of its sustainable strategy, Sofis Solutions introduced the #GreenSofis initiative, which aims to define and develop best practices, methodologies, tools, and recommendations for incorporating sustainability aspects into the software development process, addressing environmental, social, and governance factors. 

Through this initiative, the company integrates sustainable practices into project management and software lifecycle processes, implements green aspects in user interface design, follows good web usability practices, and incorporates energy estimation into the SofisBPM tool.

Java applications have traditionally been known for long startup times. Optimizing startup times has become essential for service-oriented architectures. Today, ecological and sustainable best practices are being incorporated to reduce resource consumption and improve application response times, thereby enhancing speed and efficiency. An example of this is eco-friendly Java applications using Quarkus, which significantly improve software performance. 

Quarkus enables Java developers to build cloud-native applications quickly and efficiently. A Quarkus application can run on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) or be compiled into a native binary using GraalVM, with the latter option providing faster startup. A Quarkus REST application starts in approximately a quarter of the time of traditional cloud-native stacks. In JVM mode, a Quarkus application's memory footprint is just over half that of a traditional framework, and in native mode, it is around one-tenth. These memory and startup time improvements translate into lower energy consumption over the application's lifecycle. 

Quarkus performance engineers conducted experiments using RAPL to monitor energy consumption. These experiments demonstrated that applications running on Quarkus consume less energy and, consequently, produce lower carbon emissions compared to the same application running on a traditional cloud-native framework.

As part of executing the #GreenSofis methodology, Sofis Solutions has used Quarkus in several projects to help reduce energy consumption and carbon footprint:

• Update of the Integrated Financial Information System (SIIF) of the Ministry of Economy and Finance of Uruguay (MEF), to streamline and improve its efficiency. In this project, Quarkus was used as the backend framework for its ability to meet all critical requirements. The combination of Quarkus and Kubernetes provides an ideal environment for building scalable, fast, and lightweight applications. Our applications and tools are deployed on two local Kubernetes clusters for production and non-production environments.
• 2023 Uruguay Census by the National Institute of Statistics (INE), where a microservices-based architecture using the Java Quarkus Stack was implemented. The architecture offered various advantages necessary for the project, such as low coupling, high cohesion, automatic scalability, and efficient resource usage following the #GreenSofis methodology. 

In conclusion, the use and implementation of Quarkus contribute to reducing carbon emissions in multiple ways. It supports elasticity, allowing servers to remain completely turned off until needed, is a highly efficient framework, and applications running on it consume fewer resources.