In this episode, we have a conversation with Tyson Read, a Product Manager here at Salesforce, on the impact that administrators’ and developers’ implementations are having on the environment. We discuss his project and how he is sharing this information through dashboards and guides.
Salesforce is a net zero company, so we are already offsetting all our emissions due to our data centers. In this discussion, our goal is to spread awareness as to what kind of cost there is so that others can understand what they can do about it.
If you’d like to learn more, feel free to reach out to Tyson on LinkedIn or Twitter.
Show Highlights:
- Salesforce’s overall efforts in sustainability so far.
- How to make small changes to fix our carbon footprint.
- The equation between the cost of doing business and implementation.
- The numbers developers will see if they start tracking carbon with a code.
- How are carbon dashboard might work
- The roadmap to sustainability at Salesforce.
Links:
Episode Transcript
Tyson Read:
Thinking about natural landscapes and ecology and all that has been something that I’ve been interested in and studied.
Josh Birk:
That is Tyson Reed, product manager over here at Salesforce. I’m Josh Birk, your host of the Salesforce Developer Podcast. And here on the podcast, you’ll hear stories and insights from developers, for developers. Today, we bring back Tyson to the mic to talk about something completely different than integration. We’re going to talk about a project that’s trying to help administrators and developers understand what kind of impact their implementations are having on the environment. We’re going to try to do this through dashboards, through documentation, through guides, to help you know what you can do about it. Now, I do want to make a quick call-out here before we get started. Salesforce is a net-zero company, so we are already offsetting all of the emissions that we have due to our data centers and instances. This is not in any way an effort to try to get developers and administrators to burden that cost. What we are trying to do is create awareness as to what kind of cost there is so that people can understand what they can do about it. Now, we’re going to start with Tyson’s early years, which starts off in a far-away country.
Tyson Read:
So I spent a summer working in a Malaysian logging camp. This was the thing that I did immediately after graduating from college. I lined up a gig, where they needed somebody who was happy to be out in the field and basically to live in a logging camp for a summer.
Josh Birk:
Wow.
Tyson Read:
And I was one of the people that signed up to do that. So the job that we were all there to complete was, we wanted to help do this study on how… It was Malaysian dipterocarp rainforests, so a very particular type of rainforest that sequesters carbon. And the idea being that, “Hey, we have all of these natural landscapes, and rainforest in particular are one that have a big impact on how the planet’s able to capture carbon.”
Josh Birk:
Interesting. First question, how does somebody even find out about something like that?
Tyson Read:
Yeah. This is, of course, part of the scramble of, you’re about to graduate and you got to find something to do.
Josh Birk:
Gosh. Yeah. Okay.
Tyson Read:
But yeah, this was through the POTS lab at UC Berkeley, and that’s where I was doing my undergrad. I’d been doing field work for other research labs, and the early part of my career was based on the idea of, “Oh, you need someone to go out and do some science in the middle of nowhere? Great. I’m your guy.”
Josh Birk:
Gotcha. Yeah. When did this interest in sustainability in general start for you?
Tyson Read:
I’d say, hard to pick a particular time. This is something I grew up with. My parents actually met in entomology class when they were in college, so they were this-
Josh Birk:
There you go.
Tyson Read:
Yeah, it’s a long thing. And thinking about natural landscapes and ecology and all that has been something that I’ve been interested in and studied, and has always been an area of passion for me.
Josh Birk:
Got it. Now, I’m cheating here a little bit, because looking at your CV, this answers the question, in part at least, I think, as to how you started merging that aspect with Salesforce a little bit. But tell me a little bit about PG&E’s early-bird app.
Tyson Read:
Oh, yeah, absolutely. So that was actually how I started working in the Salesforce ecosystem. At the time, I wanted a better way to collect data on protected species. I was working with a ton of other biologists that were out looking for protected birds, and trying to make sure that the operations and maintenance work that PG&E was doing wasn’t going to have any adverse impacts on those species or others, right?
Josh Birk:
Right.
Tyson Read:
And all of that generated a tremendous amount of data. And we wanted to be able to make that data available in the future and actionable and insightful, and basically all of the things that everyone wants to do with their data no matter what. So at the time, we turned to Salesforce as our way to actually start collecting that data and making sense of it. And that was my first foray into working with Salesforce as a customer and using the product, and jump in direct into building a custom app on the Mobile SDK and trying to pull all of that together.
Josh Birk:
When did that funnel into, like, “I think I want to do something like that as a job”?
Tyson Read:
It grew over time. In my mind, when I think about this, it fits into a very classic Salesforce admin story of, “Okay. Well, I just started working with this and eventually this turned into my job.”
Josh Birk:
It’s a weird, addictive quality. I don’t know what we put in the technology. But yeah, that’s a pretty common story. How would you describe your current job at Salesforce?
Tyson Read:
Yeah. So currently, now what I work on is I work on the Salesforce EventBus. So I have a lot of different pieces of technology that are all about how you build integrations between Salesforce and other systems. And then also how do you make sure that the things that you’re using within Salesforce are able to react to information that’s coming from those systems.
Josh Birk:
Got it. And so now you’re also getting interested in sustainability at Salesforce itself. How would you describe our overall efforts in sustainability?
Tyson Read:
Yeah. So I think that as a company, Salesforce has really done a lot in terms of sustainability, right? We’ve been out in front, and great leaders in this space for a long time. We’ve been a net-zero company for a very long time. We’ve made tremendous progress with Sustainability Cloud and helping customers advance the work that they want to do to track all of the impacts that they have and reduce them. And I think that it’s been an amazing part of how we as a company have not only delivered on our values for showing up for our customers, our stakeholders, their communities, but putting our product to use in that front.
Josh Birk:
When did the conversation about this idea of having developers and admins and individuals, Sustainability Cloud is very directed to companies, but the idea of individuals being able to track their carbon footprint when they’re using the Salesforce platform, how did this all start?
Tyson Read:
Yeah. So this is a broader area of interest for a lot of different people in software development. It’s often referred to as green software. That’s one of the phrases that you can search for and find out more. But it basically comes from this broader idea of, “Hey, software has a huge impact in our society, our culture, our businesses, all of that.” And that means that we need to bake sustainability into how we actually build that software.
Josh Birk:
In a lot of ways, that makes a lot of sense. Easy to track, I think, from a client server point of view. Does it complicate things when we’re trying to create a picture of that when we’re talking about an in-the-cloud, multi-tenant system?
Tyson Read:
Yeah. Absolutely. But before I even get into that, let me also just set the stage for folks around, when we’re thinking about sustainability and software, there’s a lot of different lenses that you can use to consider that, right? And broadly, there’s going to be opportunities for you to make an impact in all kinds of different aspects of sustainability, depending on what that software is that you’re building, right?
Josh Birk:
Gotcha.
Tyson Read:
So a great starting point is the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, right? There’s all of these different areas of sustainability where, when we think about a more sustainable future, we want to be making progress on all of these different points. And if you’re a developer, I think the opportunity is to think about, “Hey, what are you building? Does any of this have applicability to any of these sustainable development goals?” The one that, I think, is common to pretty much every developer is climate and the carbon impact that’s associated with your code. This is something that I think is often viewed through the lens of performance or Cost to Serve, but it’s also got an impact for climate, right? If you’ve got really, really energy-intensive code, that’s running somewhere and that’s using electricity, and that electricity might not be based on renewable sources.
Josh Birk:
Right. I find it interesting, because I remember having conversations back when we were talking about blockchain on the platform and things like that. And at the time, I didn’t feel like any of us were really talking about what is now a clear example of what you’re talking about, right? Not just the efficiency of your code, but the fact that you’ve got an entire server rack of GPUs burning down the world. So part of me has this weird, like, “Wow, Bitcoin opened my eyes as to just how bad this could actually get.”
Tyson Read:
Yeah. And I know that it’s awfully hard to exactly tie down, like, “Hey, what is the carbon footprint of the internet?” Right?
Josh Birk:
Right.
Tyson Read:
There are some very coarse estimates that have been put together, that have looked at a 2% target as the internet’s share of global carbon emissions. For a little perspective, 2% of global emissions, that’s basically on par with, say, the aviation industry or an entire country, say Canada or Germany.
Josh Birk:
Got it. Because 2% on the outset sounds low, but it’s 2% of the entire problem.
Tyson Read:
Yeah. And I think that broadly, when we’re thinking about, “Hey, how do we as developers and just people want to make action on climate change?” We need to take action basically in every way that we can. And 2% isn’t necessarily going to solve all of our problems, but this is also a 2% that’s pretty addressable. And it’s going to be much easier to think about making more performant code than it is to completely decarbonize industries like steel-making or concrete, or the transportation industry, right? Part of the beauty of working with software is that this is flexible, right?
Josh Birk:
Right.
Tyson Read:
We can make these changes, and it’s not going to be all of these long-term, physical, super hard, real-world mechanical engineering problems, that you can’t just roll back a branch and have this work better.
Josh Birk:
Right. But I see where you’re going. Because at the same time, in software engineering in general, we can wildly change our infrastructure without throwing out an entire industry unlike, say, coal.
Tyson Read:
Yeah. And an example, so I can be a little more specific here, is a lot of the times, especially when you’re thinking about an integration, right? You’re moving data back and forth. There’s an opportunity to call into question, like, “How often do you need to move that data? Do you need to move it at all? Can you virtualize data? Do you need to move this at a specific time?” Or instead of moving your data at the same time, maybe on demand, you could say, “Hey, I don’t care about when this data gets moved. Just move it when there’s a lot of renewable energy on the grid, and the electricity that we need to make this happen is as sustainable as it can be.”
Josh Birk:
Gotcha. So moving back to that, what makes up the equation in our systems, how much are we tracking here that’s the cost of doing business because I’m on a Salesforce instance, versus the implementation itself? Say, the amount of times Apex is being run, the number of clients running it, the number of data transactions, et cetera.
Tyson Read:
Yeah. And the unsatisfying answer is, it’s hard. Cloud computing, and especially multi-tenant deployments, there’s a lot going on. So I think what I’ve been thinking about lately is, “How do we take this idea though of trying to help a developer understand their code, not just through the lens of the totally normal performance metrics that anybody would be considering, but also through the lens of carbon?” Right? A lot of the times, we talk about Cost to Serve as a metric that developers will have to consider while they’re architecting new solutions. You want to make sure that you’re architecting in a manner that is going to be performant and not cost a ton of money to run. In that same vein, we got to start thinking about Carbon to Serve as well, right? Like, “How are we generating value? How is this code that we’re deploying not only going to make a difference for our customers, but also do that in a way that has the least impact on our environment?”
Josh Birk:
Well, and I think it’s an interesting way to add a dimension to it that has some real weight. Because when I’m thinking in terms of like, “What is my CPU coverage when I’m running some Apex or something like that?” I think of it in terms of very broad terms, right? It’s just a number. And one number’s going to be higher, one number’s going to be lower. Lower is good, but it doesn’t give me any real breath as to… If everything seems to be working fine, then nothing’s broken. But if it’s inefficient but productive, adding in the sustainability layer gives me another thing to evaluate that to. If developers start looking at this, and I understand this is going to be the wildest ballpark you probably are going to come with this year, but what kind of numbers do you think they’re going to see if they do start tracking their carbon with their code?
Tyson Read:
I guess this is what I’m excited about to find out.
Josh Birk:
Okay, gotcha.
Tyson Read:
And in my mind, a lot of this is really… Part of what we’re trying to accomplish is giving developers an idea of just where they stand, and being empowered to make whatever decisions they need to make. It’s not going to be realistic for everybody to reformat all of the code that they have. There’s other realities, there’s other priorities. That’s it. That’s fine. I totally get that. What I’m more interested in is trying to give developers tools to really go after this problem. If you’re a developer and you want to do something about climate change, there’s a lot that you can do in your personal life about this, right?
Josh Birk:
Yeah.
Tyson Read:
But everybody can do those things. What I’m excited about, for the opportunity for developers and people in the software space, is that this is an opportunity for you to take all of the scale that you’re building for and the power of these platforms that we build, and think about that as, like, “Hey, this is the opportunity that you have to make an impact.” If you can somehow increase the performance and save some compute that results in lower carbon emissions for your code, that actually might have a larger impact than anything that you can do in your day-to-day life.
Josh Birk:
Right. Right. Well, let’s talk a little bit about the tools themselves. What does the technology look like to build a dashboard like this?
Tyson Read:
Yeah. So, frankly, a lot of this is implementation that we’re trying to figure out right now for how we can deliver this. There’s a lot of thinking that has gone into how we can give Salesforce customers more insight into how to build more sustainable software. There’s a lot that, I think, is going to be coming forward in terms of providing people with playbooks that they can refer to and they can and use to really reduce their carbon footprint. And where this project comes in around building a sustainable developer dashboard is really providing that feedback and having those numbers so a developer can get a baseline for where their org is at, and then understand as they’re making code changes, what that underlying impact is, and whether they’re increasing the carbon emissions that are being mitigated or decreasing them.
Josh Birk:
What’s the granularity that you’re thinking the dashboard will have? Is it this kind of an org-wide, showing you the difference between, say, Apex and VisualForce or Apex and Flows, or is it going to try to pinpoint, “This method spent this much time with this much CPU, and that’s where you should be putting your magnifying glass on”?
Tyson Read:
I mean, ultimately, we’re trying to get as specific as we can. And the intention there is to really highlight, “Hey, if there’s parts of the org that are generating a fair amount of carbon,” we want to give people that insight to say, “Hey, maybe this section of Apex is one that you want to take a look at.” And there might not be a way to optimize it, maybe this is as good as it is, but at least you know, “Hey, this is where it’s at.”
Josh Birk:
If you have to batch a million records, you have to batch a million records.
Tyson Read:
Exactly. And there’s no way around that sometimes, right?
Josh Birk:
Right.
Tyson Read:
That is what it is. But the intention there is really like, “Hey, there might be some things here that you haven’t looked at,” and this gives you another lens to go after it that, frankly, is a little bit more compelling than trying to clean up old code that is not necessarily top-of-mind for the other business objectives that your company has.
Josh Birk:
Yeah. And I’ll circle back to that. I think it’s an interesting new dimension that has… I don’t know, it just feels like it has more impact to it than just time or percentages and things like that. Out of curiosity, and again, this may be a wild ballpark figure that you don’t have enough data on yet, how does, say, Apex compare to other technologies like VisualForce or Flows or Lightning Web Components? Is there one that just has more heft because of the stack behind it?
Tyson Read:
I honestly don’t know. And editorial-wise, this is a lot of stuff that we’re trying to figure out. This is a space that we’re really trying to define and bring to customers. So in my mind, what I’m trying to communicate to them is really just like, “Hey, this is a space where we’re really trying to make some progress and bring you some new insights.”
Josh Birk:
Got it. Not to be cheeky, but how do you handle the idea of adding something to an org, that may in itself have a carbon footprint, to track people’s carbon footprint?
Tyson Read:
This is absolutely something that we’ve been wrestling with, is trying to figure out, “Hey, we want to give people this information.” That doesn’t come for free if you’re going to be storing logs about what this activity is. You want to make sure that that’s actually valuable. So that’s absolutely part of the conversation that we’ve been having, about, “How do we provide customers this information in a way that, one, scales?” Because we’re talking about a lot of transactions, right?
Josh Birk:
Mm-hmm.
Tyson Read:
But also is useful. We don’t want to save a bunch of log data that’s going to be correlated with the carbon footprint if nobody’s going to look at it, right?
Josh Birk:
Right.
Tyson Read:
That’s the opposite of helpful. That doesn’t help the customer, and it also doesn’t help the planet.
Josh Birk:
Right, exactly. Well, and talking about the playbook and talking about things that may not be useful to the customer, are there key things that you’re hoping people would know, like, “Don’t start removing unit tests. Don’t start removing and debugging code,” and stuff like that?
Tyson Read:
Yes. Yeah, absolutely.
Josh Birk:
We’re putting in guidance for that kind of thing?
Tyson Read:
Yeah. I mean, right now a lot of the content that’s around the Sustainable Developer Playbook that customers are going to be seeing in the near future is really around, “What are these best practices when you’re thinking about building integrations, making architecture choices around whether things can be more asynchronous?” How you can use these patterns to your advantage. But absolutely. To your point, the basics of software engineering still apply. You still want to have test coverage.
Josh Birk:
Let’s be clear, Tyson is not saying to go back to pen and paper. That would actually be very counterproductive in a lot of different ways. How do you think this is going to line up with some of our other products like Sustainability Cloud?
Tyson Read:
Yeah, it’s a great question. So for Sustainability Cloud, the Sustainability Cloud has done a tremendous job of trying to bring information to a persona that that’s really often the sustainability team and that C-suite perspective for a company, of understanding strategically, “Where is my company with regards to our sustainability goals? How can we make progress?” And what I’m trying to solve for right now is like, “How do we tie that macro view of what a company’s doing, to something that a individual developer can actually make some day-to-day decisions on and try and see themselves as a part of that broader goal?”
Josh Birk:
Gotcha. Who all is working on this? Is this a ragtag team of people who wants to save the planet? How is this being handled internally?
Tyson Read:
This is absolutely a ragtag team of people that want to save the planet.
Josh Birk:
I love it.
Tyson Read:
So basically, the origin of this is having conversations with some of the folks that have been really leading the charge on the Sustainable Developer Playbook. And it’s getting a sense for, “How can we give customers some best practices that they can think about?”
Josh Birk:
And about how many people are in the ragtag team of people trying to save the planet are there?
Tyson Read:
Yeah, so I’d say that there’s roughly a dozen or so different folks in Salesforce that are working on this. There’s been a great supporting cast of my fellow product managers that have been jumping in to figure out, “How can we actually capture all of this data? How can we expose it to customers? How can we make sure it’s available for them and easy to consume?” This has also been a tremendous effort partnering with folks in our infrastructure team, and trying to help bring all of the expertise that they’ve got and put it in this context. And then, of course, it’s also-
Josh Birk:
Yeah.
Tyson Read:
Oh, go for it. Sorry.
Josh Birk:
No, no. I was just going to say, I assume this is a lot of looking underneath the hood to see where the wiring’s connected.
Tyson Read:
Yeah, it is. Basically, some of the origins of this project was realizing that at a data center level, we understand what the carbon footprint is of all of these data centers and of the pods that our orgs are running in. But it’s really hard to come up with a super firm number about what is the total carbon footprint of a particular org. And the reasons for that are that Salesforce is not a monolith, right?
Josh Birk:
Right.
Tyson Read:
There’s a lot of different pieces of technology that come together to give customers the experience that they’re actually seeing. Some of that is in Salesforce data centers. Some of that is not in Salesforce data centers. I don’t even know how many microservices are going to come together to do this.
Josh Birk:
Well, yeah, that just occurred to me. I’m assuming right now you’re sticking probably to Core platform, but of course we have MuleSoft, we have Slack, Tableau. We have these things that are not running on our iron, or they’re running adjacent to our iron. Is the goal to start Core and build out as successful?
Tyson Read:
Yeah. And ultimately, the thing that I’m most focused on at this point is really, “How do we help people take action?” So in my mind, this is two tracks, right? There’s the, “How do we help people within Salesforce and our Salesforce engineers take action and view the work that we already do with respect to Cost to Serve and efficiency as something that’s also, ‘Hey, it’s not just about building more efficient software that’s cheaper to run. It’s also about building more sustainable software that’s better for the planet’?” The great news is that you don’t really have to make trade-off decisions here. If you’re doing less compute, it’s generating less carbon, And that’s great.
Josh Birk:
Nice. Nice. Well, the stuff sounds amazing. What’s it looking like right now? How do you think the availability is going to look like down the future? What’s the roadmap looking like here?
Tyson Read:
Yeah. So I think that the great news that’s very near-term, is that customers can get excited about the Sustainable Developer Playbook going to be coming out. Again, a huge shout-out to the team that’s been working on that. They’ve really moved it ahead and put a lot of hard work into it. So I think that’s going to provide customers with some immediate food for thought in terms of how they’re architecting their systems. And that’s going to be a real big-picture view of what they can do. And then going beyond that in terms of, like, “Great, how do we actually get to a point where we’ve got a dashboard?” And you can see how the tools that you’re actually using as a customer, how that’s impacted by the code you’re generating, the flows you’re building, this sort of thing. This is what we’re trying to develop a path forward right now. And we basically have the straw man of, “This is the architecture of how we’re going to serve this.” And the next steps are really creating that path forward so we can package this in a way that’s easy for customers to see. And we’re not asking them to build their own dashboards, which is not a great experience, right?
Josh Birk:
Right.
Tyson Read:
We want to make this easy for folks to do the right thing, and feel like they’re really being a part of the sustainability project.
Josh Birk:
Yeah. And I mean, I think we’ve proven that there’s a lot of really interesting and potentially tough questions that need to be asked before the technology can really arise. So I think it’s great that we’re not assuming customers are going to take that bandwidth into their own possession, and that we’re going to help them move forward with it.
Tyson Read:
Yeah. One other thing that I wanted to drive home and make sure folks aren’t getting too confused, is just to remind everybody that Salesforce is a net-zero company, right?
Josh Birk:
Mm-hmm.
Tyson Read:
So today, all of the carbon that’s generated by Salesforce software is mitigated for. And what that mitigation looks like varies depending on where we’re trying to do those offsets, but you can think of it as, “Hey, there’s various carbon credits and various projects that we have to make sure that overall, we’re doing the right thing with respect to not having absolute impacts.” But the next level down that Salesforce has sustainability goals around is not only being a net-zero company, but also just driving down what the total magnitude of those emissions are.
Josh Birk:
Right. Mitigation is good, but elimination is better.
Tyson Read:
100%. Exactly.
Josh Birk:
And that’s our show. Now, before we go, I did ask after Tyson’s hobby that he would like to have, since we already asked after his non-technical hobby. And hey, this one’s got some buzz.
Tyson Read:
Good one. I feel like beekeeping could be fun.
Josh Birk:
Really?
Tyson Read:
Yeah.
Josh Birk:
Well, and I love that because it so lines up with your life.
Tyson Read:
Well, and you get a nice outfit. It’d be a strong look. It’s a nice present that you can give somebody when you’re going over for dinner or whatever. Yeah, you got options.
Josh Birk:
I want to thank Tyson for the great conversation and information. And as always, I want to thank you for listening. Now, if you want to learn more about this show, head on over to developer.salesforce.com/podcast, where you can hear old episodes, see the show notes, and have links to your favorite podcast service. Thanks again, everybody, and I’ll talk to you next week.