We started the Treehouse project at the beginning of last summer with a mini workshop. It took a while to distill our core ideas, but we finally have a white paper that attempts to provide answers to some frequently asked questions: why now? what does it mean for cloud software to be carbon-aware? what are (some of) the ways to get there? why these? etc.

It’s only the beginning, and as we go deeper into our explorations, I’m sure the details will evolve and become richer. Nonetheless, I do believe that we have a compelling vision of the future where we can, among other things, enable reasonable tradeoffs between performance and carbon consumption of cloud software stacks, an accurate way of understanding how much carbon our software systems are consuming, and optimally choose consumption sites, sources, and timing to best address the energy challenges we are all facing.

We look forward to hearing from the community. Watch out for exciting announcements coming soon from the Treehouse project!