How upgrading to Jira 8 saved a drive around the world

[#1]

Background

Earlier this month, we upgraded our production Jira DC environment from Jira 7.13.11 to Jira 8.5.1. The instance is on the larger end of the scale (14,000 projects, 1.4M issues, ~ 10,000 users in 104 countries) so there were numerous benefits we were looking forward to - such as the Lucene upgrade, CDN, general code improvements - and - batched email. Instead of sending one email for every action in Jira, you can have Jira "wait" for a period of time (say 10 minutes) and any actions in that period for a single issue will be sent in one email (it doesn't combine all actions from every issue in that period, I expect this is due to the ingestion of any replies. If you get an email for issue JIRAPROJ-1 and JIRAPROJ-2 and you reply via email, how will the ingestion system know what issue you're replying to.

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Our system was sending out somewhere in the vicinity of 950,000 emails per month. (https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-articles/Maximizing-business-value-from-your-log-files-insights-in-to-app/ba-p/1126471 touches on the monitoring process we use to collect this metric).

After enabling batched emails, we saw a reduction of ~ 25% in email volume.

I noticed on my Facebook feed someone had shared an article on the environmental cost of email/spam - each email sent has a footprint - transmission, processing (anti-spam/virus etc), and ongoing storage etc, so I did some rough calculations.

1. Average monthly emails from Jira (without batched email) - 950,000
2. Average reduction of emails since enabling batched emails (10 minute intervals) - 25%
3. Extrapolated saving of emails per year - (950,000*.25*12) = 2,850,000
4. Estimated carbon footprint of a “standard” email - 4g CO2e (ref 2)
5. Approx CO2e saving per annum (2,850,000 * 4) = 11,400,000 g (11.4 metric tonnes)
6. A typical passenger vehicle emits about 4.6 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year. (1)
7. The average passenger vehicle emits about 404 grams of CO2 per mile (ref 1)
   Cars per year - 11.4/4.6 = 2.47 cars
8. 11,400,000 / 404 = 28,217 Miles / 45,410.86 KM
9. Circumference of the earth = 24,901 Miles / 40,074 KM
10. Drives around the world saved by batched email - 1.13

References:

1. https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-typical-passenger-vehicle
2. https://carbonliteracy.com/the-carbon-cost-of-an-email/

* This is not meant to be scientific analysis, nor do I want this thread to head to a flame war on climate change science / climate change denial.

** I think my maths is correct, but.... every chance I may have miscalculated somewhere too

*** This also means that the environmental cost of emails (~ 8,550,000 per year) we are still sending out is 34.2 metric tons, or 3.39 drives around the globe.

More on batched email: https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver080/configuring-email-notifications-967897768.html

CCM

[Taranjeet Singh]

That's a great article to highlight a great cause ! Always support such causes !