Green reliability engineering: Leveraging carbon-aware AI for sustainable SRE practices in cloud platforms

As cloud-native systems continue to scale, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams face the dual challenge of ensuring service availability while minimizing environmental impact. This paper introduces the concept of Green Reliability Engineering (GRE)—an approach that integrates carbon-awareness into SRE practices using Generative AI and cloud telemetry. The proposed solution incorporates Carbon Footprint APIs, energy-efficient routing policies, and AI-powered optimization models to support carbon-aware decision-making in incident response, load balancing, and service scheduling. By leveraging tools available in Google Cloud Platform (GCP), such as Carbon Footprint reporting, Cloud Monitoring, and Vertex AI, this research demonstrates how AI-driven SRE workflows can balance reliability objectives with sustainability goals. A proof-of-concept is built around carbon-aware alert response prioritization and green load balancing across regions, showing tangible improvements in carbon reduction without compromising performance. The results advocate for the inclusion of carbon metrics as first-class citizens in SLOs, enabling a more sustainable and intelligent SRE framework. This record contains metadata only. The publisher (IRJMETS) holds exclusive distribution rights. The final article will get an IRJMETS DOI; this Zenodo DOI provides a permanent reference in the meantime.