Inspiration
Every developer knows that CI/CD pipelines are essential, but few realize the hidden environmental and financial cost. A typical pipeline runs for 20-30 minutes, multiple times per day, across thousands of projects worldwide.
I wanted to build something that would help developers SEE the impact of their CI configurations and AUTOMATICALLY fix them.
What We Learned
- Most CI configurations are inefficient - Missing caches, sequential jobs, redundant builds are extremely common
- Simple optimizations have massive impact - Adding cache alone can reduce build time by 50-70%
- Developers need visibility - Without tools like EcoPilot, teams have no idea how much they're wasting
How We Built It
EcoPilot is built with:
- Python - Core analysis engine
- FastAPI - Webhook handler for GitLab integration
- GitLab API - CI configuration and pipeline data
- YAML parsing - CI anti-pattern detection
- Railway - Production deployment
Challenges
- GitLab API encoding - Discovered GitLab returns double base64-encoded file content
- Production deployment - Configured Railway with proper environment variables
- Real-world testing - Created test projects to validate analysis accuracy
Impact
EcoPilot can help teams achieve:
- 50-80% reduction in CI costs
- 50-80% reduction in carbon emissions
- Faster pipelines through optimization
Built With
- fastapi
- gitlab-ci/cd-api
- python
- railway
- yaml