Sustainable IT in an Agile DevOps Setup Leads to a Shift Left in Sustainability Engineering

Abstract

Today green IT is mostly driven by the measurement of CO2e of data centers. However, this is a symptom treatment approach, since the operating parameters of software are defined during build-time. This implies that the consumption during run-time of a software cannot be changed in a wide range. To ensure that enterprise IT can be operated within a higher sustainable setup the software and systems engineering has to consider sustainability aspects during development phase. Furthermore, sustainability is more than measuring and optimizing CO2e of applications – it includes e.g. reuse aspects. Each software component which is reused reduces resource allocation during development and maintenance. IT sustainability step by step becomes a quality characteristic of software. This work presents a more holistic view for sustainable software engineering from an enterprise IT perspective which can be integrated into agile software development especially within DevOps teams.