Rust: The Energy-Efficient & Safe Language for Sustainable Software

Rust has become essential to AWS's infrastructure as the language is used in delivering services like Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, Amazon CloudFront, and more. 

The problem with other systems programming languages is that they often don't provide built-in features to help programmers write energy-efficient code. This means that if a programmer wants to create a program that uses as little energy as possible, they need to put in extra effort and write code that is optimized for energy efficiency.

Rust is a computer language that can help save a lot of energy. A company called Discord had a problem with one of their computer programs being too slow, so they tried rewriting it using Rust instead of other languages like Python and Go. Rust made the program work much faster and they needed fewer computers to do the same job, which saved a lot of energy. Rust is also a safer language than some other ones, like C and C++, because it has a special way of checking for mistakes that can make programs less safe.

AWS announced the sixth pillar for sustainability to the AWS Well-Architected Framework. The pillar focuses on sustainability as a principle in modern software design, and it advocates for operational choices that prioritize resource use efficiency, longer device upgrade cycles, and automated lifecycle policies that delete data as soon as possible. The company also aims to have 100% of its data centers powered with renewable energy by 2025 and has invested in renewable energy. However, renewable energy should not replace energy efficiency as a design principle.

Rust's energy efficiency and safety features make it a promising language for developing sustainable software systems.