Ryan Gibb and I have been thinking about how the current Internet architecture fails to treat the carbon emissions
associated with networked services as a first-class metric. So when the LOCO conference came up, we tried extending the DNS with load balancing techniques to consider the carbon cost of scheduling decisions. A next step was then to build a custom DNS server written in OCaml to actively wake machines running networked services as a side effect of the name
resolution.
Extending DNS means that we maintain compatibility with existing Internet
infrastructure, unlocking the ability for existing applications to be
carbon-aware. This is very much a spiritual follow on to the
Signposts project that I worked on back in 2013, and
have always wanted to return to!