DevOps and Sustainable Software Engineering: Bridging Speed, Reliability, and Environmental Responsibility

Abstract

With the current rate of digitalization, the most dominant paradigm for increasing the speed of software delivery and making the systems more reliable has been DevOps. At the same time, the growing demand to address environmental issues concerning the level of carbon emissions of the digital infrastructure has brought the requirements of Sustainable Software Engineering (SSE) methods to the fore. In this paper, the author will discuss the relationship between DevOps and sustainability and how organizations can overcome the juggling act that exists between speed of development, operational stability, and environmental sustainability. Using an extensive literature review, empirical case studies on energy-efficient DevOps pipelines, and analysis of the ways to incorporate sustainability metrics in a continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) process, we pinpoint the approaches to integrating sustainability metrics in the continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) process. We found that combining DevOps with an SSE focus, including carbon-aware design, green resource provisioning, and green testing automation, results in a measure of environmental reduction and improved longer-term software maintainability. This work contributes to the growing body of green software development literature, offering a framework that practitioners and researchers can draw upon to foster innovation and ecological stewardship in software development today.