Energy-Aware Software: Designing and Evolving Greener Architectures

The ICT sector consumes around 4% of global electricity and contributes significantly to greenhouse gas emissions. According to Gartner, over 74% of organisations have adopted microservices architectures — highlighting the importance of understanding how to design, refactor, and migrate software systems toward greener, more sustainable architectures. We explore strategies for reducing the energy footprint of software systems, review current methodologies for measuring software energy consumption (with a representative case study), consider how to design energy-efficient microservices (service granularity, communication overhead, deployment choices, autoscalers and their trade-off between energy and performance), and present ongoing research on using Large Language Models to support the sustainability-driven decomposition of monolithic systems into microservices.