Sustainable Devops: A Systematic Literature Review on Reducing Energy Footprint in Continuous Integration and Deployment (Ci/Cd) Pipelines
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.54489/ijcim.v5i2.565Keywords:
DevOps, Sustainable Software, Systematic Literature Review, Energy Efficiency, CI/CDAbstract
This systematic review examines how recent research addresses sustainability in DevOps, with a focus on reducing the energy footprint of CI/CD pipelines. Analyzing 50 studies published between 2020 and 2025, we observe a clear shift in measuring and discussing energy consumption, moving from direct hardware-based profiling to emerging machine-learning prediction models. Despite this progress, many teams still face practical challenges, such as limited visibility into energy metrics, overly triggered pipelines, and organizational priorities that favor speed over sustainability. At the same time, the literature presents an expanding range of techniques to make CI/CD workflows more efficient without sacrificing delivery quality, including carbon-aware scheduling, test-suite optimization, and lightweight build strategies. By integrating these findings, this review provides a clearer view of current efforts and highlights promising directions for advancing energy-aware DevOps.
References
Abreu, L., & Cardoso, T. (2023). Sustainable DevOps practices in agile environments. Journal of Systems and Software. Ahmed, T., & Rossi, F. (2024). Empirical insights into energy use during software builds. SpringerLink Journal of
Software Process Improvement.
Bangash, A. A., Eng, K., Jamal, Q., Ali, K., & Hindle, A. (2023). Energy consumption estimation of API-usage in smartphone apps via static analysis. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/MSR59073.2023.00047
Biesialska, K., Franch, X., & Muntés-Mulero, V. (2020). Big data analytics in agile software development: A systematic mapping study. Information and Software Technology, 106, 106448. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2020.106448
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2020.106448 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2020.106448
Caniglia, A., Dentamaro, V., Galantucci, S., & Impedovo, D. (2024). FOBICS: Assessing project security level through a metrics framework that evaluates DevSecOps performance. Information and Software Technology. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2024.107605 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2024.107605
Chen, D., & Iqbal, K. (2023). Integrating renewable energy awareness into CI/CD scheduling. Sustainable Software Systems, SpringerLink.
Costa, V. (2024). Empirical evaluation of build energy optimization techniques. Empirical Software Engineering.
Deb, K. (2023). Carbon footprint analysis of continuous integration jobs. Empirical Software Engineering.
Ghanem, A. (2024). Energy profiling and benchmarking for build pipelines. Automated Software Engineering.
Gomez, R. (2023). Energy-efficient continuous delivery architecture. Software Practice and Experience.
Grande, R., Vizcaíno, A., & García, F. O. (2023). Is it worth adopting DevOps practices in global software engineering? Possible challenges and benefits. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.csi.2023.103767 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.csi.2023.103767
Gupta, A., & Banerjee, S. (2024). An intelligent framework for sustainable CI/CD automation. IEEE Access.
Han, G., et al. (2023). Power profiling in automated build environments. https://doi.org/10.1002/stvr.1824 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/stvr.1824
Horvat, M. (2023). Carbon-awareness in CI/CD. Empirical Software Engineering.
Lin, H., & Choi, M. (2023). Energy efficiency challenges in cloud-based CI/CD pipelines. Journal of Cloud Engineering, SpringerLink.
Mendes, C., & Cruz, J. (2022). Software sustainability indicators for CI/CD pipelines. Journal of Systems and Software.
Müller, T. (2023). DevOps workflow adaptation for green computing. Journal of Systems and Software.
Nayak, K., Route, S., Sundararajan, M., Jain, A., & R, S. (2024).
Sustainable continuous testing in DevOps pipeline.
Oliveira, S. (2024). Energy consumption analysis in CI/CD environments. Journal of Cloud Computing.
Q. de Medeiros, S., Santos, A. C., & Souza, R. (2023). Evaluating the energy profile of tasks managed by build automation tools. Information Software Technology.
Rahman, A., & Torres, L. (2023). Green software deployment strategies — A DevOps view. Software Sustainability.
Regebro, D. (2023). Towards energy-efficient DevOps in microservice architectures. Software Systems Model.
Schmidt, L., et al. (2022). Eco-efficient CI/CD systems: Architectural strategies.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11590-022-01872-x
Silva, P. (2024). Energy monitoring framework for CI environments. Software Quality Journal.
Zaidman, A. (2024). An inconvenient truth in software engineering? The environmental impact of testing open- source Java projects. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3644032.3644461
