What We Know vs What We Do: A Research and Practitioner View on Sustainable Microservices

The ICT sector accounts for a significant and growing share of global electricity consumption, and microservices have become the default architectural style for cloud-native systems, adopted by the large majority of engineering organisations. Yet how sustainable these architectures actually are, in research and in practice, remains poorly understood. This talk reviews what the literature currently knows about energy consumption in microservice systems, drawn from a systematic literature review of 40 primary studies, and contrasts it with how sustainability is actually understood and practised in industry, based on a mixed-methods survey of 62 practitioners. The two pictures often diverge: technical knowledge and intent are rarely the limiting factor. Sustainability in industry turns out to be technically executed but organisationally gated, with adoption blocked less by missing tools or expertise than by the absence of organisational mandate, incentive, or measurement culture.