Existing literatureΒΆ
Note
Green CI/CD is an active area of research and development meaning the list of resources provided in this section is far from complete. It mainly serves to provide pointers to helpful references.
There are a few studies on this topic, for example Carbon Awareness in CI/CD (Classen et al, 2023) and Carbon-Aware Continuous Integration: Reducing Emissions Without Sacrificing Performance (Laskar, 2025). These mostly rely on scheduling workloads for low-carbon times or shifting to low-carbon locations, as well as reducing overhead in the workloads (e.g., through minimisation of unnecessary runs and builds).
In terms of the GitHub Actions CI/CD framework specifically, the conference poster Environmentally-aware use of GitHub Actions (Alvarez, 2024) proposes good practices and evaluates their impact on workflow time and the implied energy usage for an example setup. Environmental impact of CI/CD pipelines (Saavedra et al, 2025) takes a step back and provides an assessment of the environmental impact of the GitHub Actions infrastructure on the whole.
Tools like Eco CI can help measuring/estimating the energy consumption of CI/CD runs which can help making informed decisions about adapting the runs. There are a range of other tools out there that can help you make your software development practices greener.