Microsoft Events, featuring Martin Woodward, explores the intersection of Agentic DevOps, GitHub Copilot, and sustainable software development with actionable strategies for environmentally conscious coding.

Building Sustainable Software with Agentic DevOps and GitHub Copilot

Speaker: Martin Woodward (Microsoft Events)

This Microsoft Ignite 2025 session delves into practical strategies for building sustainable, environmentally friendly software using modern Agentic DevOps practices on GitHub. The session spotlights AI-powered tools—especially GitHub Copilot—and their growing role in optimizing code, reducing carbon footprints, and empowering ethical software development at scale.

Key Topics Covered

• Personal Carbon Footprint Awareness
  • Recognizing individual impact as developers
  • Incremental improvements for sustainability
• Transparency in Sustainability
  • Reviewing Microsoft's public sustainability reports
  • Encouraging transparency in development teams
• Integrating Sustainability into Developer Workflows
  • Aligning agile practices and stand-ups with sustainability objectives
• AI Misuse and Environmental Impact
  • Understanding the environmental costs of AI computation
  • Strategies to avoid unnecessary AI resource consumption
• Enterprise Build Performance Optimization
  • Monitoring action usage
  • Techniques for minimizing waste in automated builds and CI/CD workflows
• Environmentally Conscious Development
  • Encouraging green practices among the developer community
• Agentic AI Tooling
  • Introduction to agentic AI solutions from GitHub Next
  • Real-world applications of AI agents for usability analysis and workflow automation
• GitHub Copilot as an Empowerment Tool
  • Improving developer productivity sustainably
  • Identifying product usability issues and feature difficulties through AI assistance

Resources and Further Learning

• Agentic DevOps with GitHub Copilot - Microsoft Ignite
• Climate Action Plan for Developers
• Green Software Directory
• Continuous AI (GitHub Next)
• Agentic Workflows (GitHub Next)

Session Chapters

• 0:00 — Carbon footprint acknowledgment, theme introduction
• 6:14 — Transparency and public reporting
• 6:39 — Connecting sustainability and daily developer practices
• 11:00 — AI misuse and environmental awareness
• 25:27 — Monitoring and optimizing build pipelines
• 26:59 — Promoting green development practices
• 29:29 — Introduction to agentic AI tools from GitHub Next
• 33:36 — AI help for usability and feature analysis
• 38:36 — Sustaining environmentally conscious software development

Takeaways

• AI tools like GitHub Copilot can boost development speed and sustainability
• Environmentally conscious coding is an attainable goal through incremental changes
• DevOps teams can implement monitoring and optimization strategies to reduce carbon footprints
• Agentic AI tooling opens the door to proactively identifying inefficiencies and usability challenges

Author: Martin Woodward (Microsoft Events)