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Description
The Pitch
1. What problem does your idea solve?
Everyday thousands of millions of people are viewing and creating web content. This results in a huge stream of information which is physically hosted and processed in datacenters around the globe with a significant impact on global carbon emissions.
This environmental impact can be reduced by a more efficient carbon-aware design of the intrinsic Internet components and software systems, so the heavier processes and therefore more energy intensive, could only happen at specific times when the energy grid production is cleaner and environmentally friendly.
CarbStatus goal is to reduce carbon emissions by shifting the usage of webapps to their optimal time range by leveraging the Carbon-Aware-SDK.
2. What does your solution do?
For every Internet-facing application, we automatically estimate a CarbStatus index, which is the result of the average carbon emissions of all the locations involved in the application loading process. Therefore, this information and the forecast during a 24 hour time window, is programmatically and visually exposed in the CarbStatus application, to let the visitors or customers know in advance which is the optimal time to consume an app’s resources.
3. How does your solution use the API/SDK?
A browser automation tool is used to simulate the navigation experience similar to what a user would do. Then, all the requests and resources involved in this simulated interaction are captured and mapped according to the data weight, response time and location information. The location data is used to get the optimal marginal carbon intensity window and the forecast of the future marginal carbon intensity values. This is achieved by calling the /emissions/forecasts/current method from the CarbonAware WebApi endpoint. This process is further optimized to reduce the number of API calls by caching the results.
4. What is the impact of your solution?
CarbStatus directly enables carbon emission reduction by shifting the Internet usage towards the optimal carbon intensity window. Our index takes into account not only the emissions data but also the application stats like high response times which may be produced by undesired high load situations, known to be energy intensive and hence, negatively affect the carbon emissions.
With zero effort required from the applications, they are provided with a custom CarbStatus page and CarbStatus API which can be used to unleash unlimited possibilities. For example, they can use CarbStatus for their own business purposes, such as to develop carbon-aware processes. Also, for a better user-experience, such as to inform the users, bots and let browsers know when a new interaction should take place. The reach is immense. This will positively impact both the users and applications as they will be able to predict and even shape how their load should look like and immediately benefit from a cost and emissions reduction.
5. Describe your solution’s feasibility?
CarbStatus can quickly reach a production ready state and eventually, be able to provide SLAs to applications relying on it for their day to day operations. It is currently built using an event-based architecture connecting multiple Node.js microservices which can easily scale up. Prize money is key to support the infrastructure and time would be invested to build a user engaging, high quality product.
CarbStatus is open sourced and can be forked by anyone wishing to build upon it or deploy their own hosted version. Also, we provide custom CarbStatus pages and a CarbStatus API integration out-of-the-box, with clean documentation, meaning everyone is able to get an instant benefit from it and implement it in their workflows of choice.
We enable quality and reliable emissions-based data thanks to the Carbon-Aware-SDK, without forcing applications to go through a complicated or frustrating workflow. We think they would like the result, because they can use it right away, for example by just sharing their CarbStatus page in their official sites, communities or social media, and increase the value of their products by an increased transparency and environmental responsibility.
6. Describe the vision for your solution.
CarbStatus envisions a world where the entire software development life cycle follows carbon-aware principles. There are obvious complexities around this paradigm shift, but we want to facilitate this process to all sorts of web applications and software processes. The level of complexity differs among businesses and the markets are extremely competitive, to the extent that such a change may seem like an impossible challenge for the businesses with the thinnest margins. CarbStatus doesn’t discriminate against the more pollutant or the less carbon efficient technologies, since we know every application has an optimal time window to boost climate action and probably, we are letting them know for the very first time!
We think everyone has a role in the fight against climate change and CarbStatus empowers everyone to push towards this direction.
7. The URL to the prototype app and/or code (e.g. Github + e.g. example.com/Carb22solution)
Github URL: https://github.com/sirdmon/carbstatus
APP URL: https://carbstatus.audits.digital