Green CI/CD: Carbon-Aware Build & Test Scheduling for Large Monorepos

Abstract

Software development's ever-increasing impact on the environment makes it imperative that CI/CD pipelines' continuing development approach is sustainable. It is well-known that big monorepos provide unique difficulties to CI/CD workflows; this article addresses these issues by discussing carbon-conscious build and test scheduling approaches adapted to these repos. Reducing the environmental impact of construction and test operations without sacrificing efficiency or performance is the goal. Incorporating carbon-conscious scheduling into the research allowed the authors to identify the tactics that might be employed to schedule energy-bearing systems in a way that minimizes resource waste without sacrificing system delivery. Data from carbon emissions, energy consumption, and CI/CD logs are gathered across several monorepo setups as part of the research design. The efficacy of these strategies is assessed in comparison to the traditional approaches. Even though the CI/CD pipeline's efficiency remained the same or even improved, the data show a significant drop in carbon emissions.