Development and deployment process

Look for opportunities to reduce your sustainability impact by making changes to your development, test, and deployment practices. 

Use dynamically created build servers for building your containerized workload

Using dynamically created build servers (such as AWS CodeBuild), ensures that while building your containerized images, the needed infrastructure is being provisioned when the build process starts, and being terminated as soon as the build process ends.

Use pre-defined or built runtimes to reduce your build time, and reuse needed dependencies for the build process 

When building different types of containerized applications, using common and standardized runtimes for the build process reduces the operational management of creating and maintaining custom images. Also, by using the specific type of runtime for your build server, it verifies that no common dependency is being downloaded and configured as part of the build process. All relevant dependencies are being incorporated into the different runtimes of your build servers, and are being used many times by different build processes for different applications. An example of multiple build runtimes can be found in the AWS CodeBuild documentation.

Update your parent and base image regularly

Update your base and parent images to the latest versions, as sometimes there is a performance improvement that is introduced in newer versions. These improvements are translated into a sustainability improvement as it affects the resource consumption of the underlying infrastructure, and as a result improves the overall efficiency.

Delete unused or obsolete container images

As described in the Cost Optimization Pillar whitepaper, create mechanisms to verify that unused or obsolete container images are deleted. This can be achieved, for example, by registry lifecycle policies, as exists in Amazon ECR.