How China Agricultural Bank Achieved Advanced DevOps Maturity Across Two Core Projects

Large enterprises worldwide have found that standardization and tool empowerment are key to success. The DevOps standards and the continuous delivery pipeline platform based on these standards can significantly improve quality and efficiency, enhancing safety, agility, and market competitiveness.

On October 26, 2023, the 21st GOPS Global Operations Conference was held in Shanghai, co‑hosted by GreatOPS and the DevOps Era Community. At the event, the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) announced the latest batch of DevOps capability maturity assessment results.

China Agricultural Bank participated with two projects: the Distributed Core Open System Control (OSC) and the Online Payment Platform – Third‑Party Fast Payment Module . Both projects passed CAICT’s Technical Operations Level‑2 assessment, indicating that the bank’s DevOps capabilities are at an advanced domestic level.

The bank also passed two Agile Development Management assessments in this batch.

To date, the bank has passed 12 Continuous Delivery assessments, 4 DevSecOps (security and risk management) assessments, 2 Technical Operations assessments, 2 Agile Development Management assessments, and 1 Application Design assessment.

Interview Highlights

Q: Please introduce the projects you evaluated.

A: The Distributed Core Control system serves as the gateway for the bank’s distributed core, providing unified security checks, message conversion, routing, logging, and traffic governance. It handles high transaction volumes and is critical for core business stability. The Fast Payment system connects to multiple payment channels, offering end‑to‑end payment, refund, reconciliation, and error‑adjustment services, handling large daily transaction volumes with high accuracy requirements.

Q: How does passing the DevOps Technical Operations assessment feel?

A: We appreciate CAICT’s recognition and guidance. The assessment validated our technical operations achievements, helped us identify gaps, and confirmed that both projects reached Level‑2 advanced status, with some domains achieving Level‑3 leadership.

Q: Why is technical operations critical for the financial sector?

A: Financial information systems are national critical infrastructure; their stability directly impacts financial security. We focus on building a digital technology‑operation system, intelligent monitoring, and automated incident response to meet the challenges of massive, diversified, and mobile banking workloads.

Q: How did you select the projects for assessment?

A: We chose systems that are both business‑critical and technically representative, already possess strong capabilities, and allow us to discover gaps and drive improvement. Both projects were among the bank’s first SRE‑built teams.

Q: What improvements resulted from the assessment?

A: The assessment encouraged us to refine standards, processes, platforms, and team structures. We built a comprehensive monitoring system, a unified configuration center, and leveraged AIOps for risk detection and automated response. Specific gains include 100% configuration completeness, >90% event detection rate, and streamlined emergency workflows.

Q: What are the architectural highlights of the evaluated systems?

A: The Distributed Core Control adopts a cloud‑native, distributed database architecture with rapid scaling and high fault tolerance, including multi‑dimensional rate limiting and automatic circuit breaking. The Fast Payment system achieved active‑active disaster recovery, multi‑copy data storage, and sub‑second recovery times for critical transactions.

Q: Was the assessment process smooth?

A: Overall it was smooth, though we faced challenges such as the breadth of the seven‑domain standard, limited prior experience, and coordinating multiple departments. With strong SRE collaboration and guidance from consultants, we completed the assessment within a few months.

Q: How does the DevOps standard help your enterprise?

A: The standard provides a mature capability model and performance metrics, guiding us to improve research‑development‑operations efficiency and supporting digital transformation.

Q: What are your future plans for DevOps?

A: We will continue to raise standards in monitoring, configuration, and business continuity, while strengthening capacity in cost management and user experience, aiming for comprehensive improvement across all seven technical‑operation domains.

Q: What is your view on the future of DevOps?

A: DevOps breaks down silos between development and operations, enhancing communication, efficiency, quality, and cost reduction. We will further apply digital and platform‑based approaches to optimize operations and elevate overall R&O effectiveness.

Industry Participation Details

As of October 26, 2023, six major state‑owned commercial banks have participated in the DevOps Capability Maturity Model assessments, with varying numbers of projects evaluated across continuous delivery, technical operations, security, and other domains.

DevOps Capability Maturity Model Overview

The “Research‑Development‑Operations Integration (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model” series, led by CAICT with contributions from cloud‑computing alliances, top internet companies, and major financial and telecom enterprises, is the first comprehensive DevOps standard worldwide. It has been approved by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and adopted by many leading enterprises.

The standard, finalized in July 2020 by the ITU‑T, includes 14 parts covering agile development management, continuous delivery, technical operations, DevSecOps, system and tool standards, business value management, collaborative development‑operations, continuous testing, performance measurement, platform engineering, and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE).