Abstract

Financial institutions are rapidly adopting cloud-native microservices to achieve agility and scalability, yet this evolution raises sustainability concerns due to increased energy consumption. This study presents a comprehensive framework for designing energy-efficient microservices within financial systems, emphasizing architecture, deployment, and runtime optimization. The methodology expands prior work by incorporating empirical findings, comparative benchmarks, and reproducible configurations for AWS Lambda, Fargate, and Graviton environments. Results demonstrate that combining asynchronous communication, autoscaling, and ARM-based instances can reduce total energy consumption by up to 60 % without compromising latency or compliance. The paper further introduces carbon-aware scheduling, policy-as-code governance, and energy-aware CI/CD practices that institutionalize sustainable software delivery. By applying these design principles, organizations can significantly lower the carbon footprint of Spring Boot–based microservices while maintaining the reliability, availability, and performance required in the financial domain.

References

• A. Padmanabhan, “Building Sustainable, Efficient, and Cost-Optimized Applications on AWS,” AWS Compute Blog, Aug. 2023.
• A. Chawla, “AWS Leads by Example with a Robust Green Architecture and Sustainability Program,” Rackspace Blog, 2024.
• S. Lal, “Understanding and Mitigating High Energy Consumption in Microservices,” InfoQ, 2025.
• Y. Zhao, T. De Matteis, and J. Bogner, “How Does Microservice Granularity Impact Energy Consumption and Performance?” Proc. ICSA, 2025.
• M. Stocker and M. Wahler, “Energy Consumption Across JVM and Framework Versions,” SSRN, 2025.
• Amazon Web Services, “AWS Fargate FAQs,” 2023.
• 451 Research / S&P Global, “Saving Energy in Europe by Using Amazon Web Services,” 2021.
• Sopra Steria & AWS, “Accelerating Development Speed by 90 % Using AWS Serverless Technology,” Case Study, 2025.
• Cloudtech, “Mid-Market Financial Services Organization Finds Success with Event-Driven Architecture,” 2024.
• P. Nguyen, “Runtime Efficiency with Spring (today and tomorrow),” Spring Blog, 2023.
• Amazon Web Services, “Sustainability Pillar – AWS Well-Architected Framework,” 2023.
• Google Cloud, “Carbon-Intelligent Compute Platform,” Technical Whitepaper, 2022.
• Microsoft Azure, “Sustainability by Design: Green Cloud Principles,” Azure Architecture Center, 2023.
• J. Patel et al., “Power-Efficient Serverless Computing: A Comparative Study,” IEEE Access, 2024.
• N. Gupta and H. Lee, “AI-Driven Workload Placement for Low-Carbon Clouds,” Future Internet, 2023.
• C. Mora et al., “Global Carbon Intensity and Data-Center Demand,” Nature Climate Change, 2022.
• A. Baliga, “Measuring Energy Efficiency in Cloud-Native Systems,” ACM Computing Surveys, 2023.
• S. Rahman and D. Zhang, “Lifecycle Energy Assessment for Serverless Architectures,” Sustainable Computing, 2024.
• L. Bell, “Carbon-Aware Workload Scheduling in Hybrid Clouds,” IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing, 2023.
• R. Garg et al., “Greening DevOps: CI/CD Energy Optimization,” Journal of Software Engineering Research, 2024.
• T. Bajpai, “Energy-Aware Autoscaling in Microservices,” IEEE Cloud, 2023.
• D. Schulz and P. Vajda, “Virtual Threads and Sustainability in Java,” Oracle Labs Technical Report, 2023.
• G. Lopez, “Data-Tier Optimization for Sustainable Cloud Analytics,” Information Systems Frontiers, 2023.
• S. Kumar and M. Patnaik, “Sustainable Data Storage Policies for Financial Institutions,” International Journal of Computer Applications, 2024.
• L. Chen, “Machine Learning for Predictive Autoscaling and Energy Saving,” IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Computing, 2022.
• H. Kim et al., “Energy-Efficient Serverless Architectures for Financial Applications,” Elsevier SoftwareX, 2024.
• J. Wang, “Graviton3: Advancing ARM Performance-per-Watt in the Cloud,” AWS Blog, 2023.
• J. Davis and K. Yamada, “Comparative Study of Cloud Hardware Efficiency Metrics,” IEEE Computer, 2022.
• A. Iyer et al., “Green Observability Framework for Microservices,” ICSE Workshops, 2023.
• R. Malik, “Policy-as-Code Approaches for Sustainability Compliance,” Software Practice and Experience, 2023.
• E. Santos et al., “Carbon-Aware CI/CD Pipelines,” IEEE Software, 2024.
• F. Zhou and J. Li, “Data Compression and Energy Consumption Trade-Offs in Cloud Databases,” Information Sciences, 2024.
• I. Ahmed and N. Paul, “AI for Sustainable Cloud Operations: A Systematic Review,” MDPI Sustainability, 2025.
• S. Basu, “Blockchain and Carbon Accounting for Financial Systems,” FinTech Journal, 2024.
• A. Krishnan, “Predictive FinOps and Carbon Budgets in Hybrid Clouds,” ACM Digital Finance, 2024.
• J. Rodriguez et al., “Empirical Evaluation of Serverless Energy Profiles,” Journal of Cloud Computing, 2023.
• D. Hoffman, “Greener JVM Tuning for High-Frequency Trading Systems,” Oracle Technical Paper, 2024.
• M. Singh, “Event-Driven Architecture for Sustainable FinTech Systems,” IEEE PuneCon, 2025.
• G. Park, “Security and Compliance Energy Overheads in Financial APIs,” Journal of Information Security, 2023.
• P. Jones and L. White, “Carbon Metrics Standardization in Cloud Ecosystems,” ISO Working Draft Report, 2025.
• A. Fernandez, “Future Directions in Low-Carbon Digital Infrastructures,” IEEE Green ICT, 2024.
• C. Barrett et al., “RISC-V and Sustainable Computing,” IEEE Micro, 2024.
• WattTime, “Real-Time Marginal Emissions Data API,” Technical Overview, 2025. Available: https://www.watttime.org/
• M. Choi, “Reinforcement Learning for Energy-Aware Cloud Scheduling,” IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing, 2024.