Energy Consumption Estimation of CI CD Pipeline Agents

The lack of flexibility and delays in the software delivery processes led to the creation of DevOps practices, such as CI/CD pipelines, to automate the process of building and deploying applications. These tools are widely used today in software development environments. However, there is little research on the sustainability involved in these processes. This study uses Intel Power Gadget to estimate the power consumption of a server running the CI/CD of a Node.js application on two different platforms: cloudbased pipelines from Microsoft Azure cloud, and GitHub Actions. Moreover, the manual build and deployment without automation tools were also calculated for comparison with the CI/CD approach. The study revealed that although not using automation tools generates slightly less energy consumption, there is no significant difference between using cloud-based pipelines and manually building and deploying an application. It is therefore concluded that the use of DevOps could be sustainable when using cloud services and optimizing the pipeline architecture.