Sustainable DevOps: Measuring and Reducing the Carbon Footprint of CI/CD Pipelines and Cloud Workloads

Abstract

Software engineering processes contribute measurably to organisational carbon footprints, yet CI/CD pipelines and cloud workload scheduling remain largely unoptimised for energy efficiency. This paper introduces GreenPipeline, a carbon-aware scheduling framework that shifts non-urgent CI jobs and batch workloads to grid periods of high renewable energy availability, integrated with the Electricity Maps API for real-time carbon intensity data. Deployed across 5 organisations spanning Europe and North America, GreenPipeline reduced pipeline-attributable CO? emissions by an average of 31% with less than 2% increase in end-to-end pipeline duration. A carbon accounting methodology for CI/CD and cloud operations and a set of green DevOps KPIs are proposed for industry adoption.