Speaker
Description
Sustainable Software Engineering (SSE) seeks to ensure that software systems meet societal and functional demands while minimising environmental impact and resource consumption across their lifecycle. Achieving SSE requires rigorous architectural design, measurable sustainability metrics, and the systematic integration of sustainability principles throughout both development and operation. Crucially, long-term system resilience depends on balancing technical performance with environmental considerations by accounting for environmental conditions and operational circumstances at runtime. However, existing research offers limited guidance on selecting and enacting sustainable architectural changes specifically for Microservices Architectures (MSA) during execution. This paper introduces the Green Computing Tactic Framework (GCTF), a technology-agnostic framework designed to enable autonomous, runtime sustainability-aware Architectural Tactic (SAT) adaptation. While acknowledging organisational, environmental, and regulatory influences, GCTF focuses on fine-grained technical mechanisms that support architectural-level sustainability decisions. The framework formalises context-aware adaptation as a function of: (i) multi-layer runtime state composition and Quality Attribute (QA) assessment, (ii) behavioural labelling that captures the intended self-behaviour of a service, and (iii) categorisation of architectural tactics aligned with the functional roles of services within their workload context. To ensure principled sustainability, SAT selection is further structured through a green strategy layer that encompasses the avoidance, reduction, and neutralisation of energy and carbon consumption. This prioritises the elimination of unnecessary work, minimisation of resource intensity, and environmentally informed execution of unavoidable work. While initial validation activities are underway, this paper primarily contributes a systematically grounded framework intended to enable and structure sustainability-aware architectural adaptation. Future work will report quantitative and qualitative evaluation results. By elevating sustainability-oriented tactics across architecture, data management, infrastructure, and operations, GCTF provides fine-grained technical mechanisms that complement existing DevOps, GreenOps, and FinOps practices, enabling sustainable software systems that adapt responsibly at runtime.