How China’s Aviation IT System Achieved Leading DevOps Standards

Domestic and international large‑scale enterprises have shown that standardization and tool empowerment are key to success. The DevOps standards and the DevOps continuous delivery pipeline platform can significantly improve quality, efficiency, safety, and agility, enhancing market competitiveness.

The China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) has released the "Research‑Development‑Operations Integration (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model" series standards, which guide enterprise DevOps implementation. Companies from banking, securities, insurance, communications, and internet sectors are actively participating in CAICT assessments, improving related IT capabilities.

On December 15, 2023, the GOLF+ IT New Governance Leadership Forum was held in Beijing, where CAICT announced the latest batch of DevOps and AIOps standard assessment results.

China Civil Aviation Information Network Co., Ltd. (China Aviation) participated with its "Flight Management System" project, which successfully passed CAICT's DevOps Technical Operations Level 2+ assessment, representing a domestic leading level. Notably, China Aviation is the first aviation industry company to pass the DevOps standard assessment.

Assessment unit: China Academy of Information and Communications Technology

We interviewed Xing Tongkun, Deputy General Manager of the R&D Center, and Li Ning, Senior Open‑System Operations Engineer, to discuss details and experiences of the assessment.

Q&A

Q: Please introduce the project you evaluated.

A (Xing Tongkun): The Flight Management System is one of the three core systems of the Passenger Service System (PSS), handling massive high‑concurrency online transactions with complex business, intensive transactions, strong real‑time requirements, and stringent safety and reliability demands.

The system provides flight planning, query, inventory control, seat‑map management, and passenger itinerary services, supporting airline efficiency, process re‑engineering, revenue control, and large‑scale network hub development, ultimately improving passenger service and reducing delays.

Built on China Aviation's self‑developed cloud computing platform, the system peaks at over 10,000 transactions per second with an average inventory response time under 5 ms, serving billions of passenger trips annually.

Q: How does it feel to achieve the Technical Operations Level 2+ assessment?

A (Xing Tongkun): We thank CAICT for recognizing our technical operations capability. The assessment, based on a scientific framework, validated our achievements and provided guidance for future improvements.

We achieved Level 3 in over 20 of the 35 capability sub‑domains, confirming the feasibility of our construction approach.

Q: What considerations led you to select this project for assessment?

A (Xing Tongkun): First, the system is representative in business, technology, and importance. Second, its technical operations maturity is high, built on a cloud‑native architecture with mature monitoring, incident response, change management, and capacity management, following SRE principles.

Q: What does the assessment mean for your team and what improvements were made?

A (Li Ning): The cross‑departmental team collaborated intensively for six months, achieving the goals. The assessment affirmed our processes, standards, tools, and organization, encouraging excellence and efficient collaboration.

It deepened our understanding of DevOps standards, highlighted strengths and gaps, and helped us formulate a long‑term improvement plan.

We iterated on the seven technical‑operations capability areas, such as automating monitoring‑alert‑incident workflows, closing the loop on configuration and capacity management, enhancing event management, and improving platform inter‑connectivity for fine‑grained operations.

Q: What are the technical features of the system and how was it designed?

A (Li Ning): The system adopts Domain‑Driven Design, building domain models and dividing micro‑services accordingly. It runs on a cloud computing platform with a distributed database architecture, enabling rapid scaling, fault isolation, multi‑dimensional rate limiting, and automatic circuit breaking, ensuring high availability.

Q: What is your view on the DevOps standard?

A (Li Ning): Using DevOps to drive IT system construction is an industry consensus. DevOps guides automation across development, testing, deployment, and operation, improving product lifecycle quality and elevating overall operational efficiency.

Other industry participation statistics show numerous enterprises across sectors have undergone DevOps capability assessments.

The "Research‑Development‑Operations Integration (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model" series standards, led by CAICT with contributions from cloud computing alliances, high‑efficiency operations communities, BATJ, and major financial, communications, and internet companies, constitute the most complete and authoritative DevOps standards in China.

Published by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the standards have been adopted by many leading enterprises and were formally concluded by the ITU‑T in July 2020 as the world’s first international DevOps standard.

The DevOps architecture covers process (agile management, continuous delivery, technical operations), application design, security and risk management (DevSecOps), systems and tools, business value management, collaborative development and operations, continuous testing, performance measurement, platform engineering, and reliability engineering (SRE).

Contact for DevOps standard assessment:

CAICT – Liu Kaili: Phone 156 5078 6171, Email [email protected]

CAICT – Bai Hanxiong: Phone 159 1076 9206, Email [email protected]

GreatOps Community – Wei Huanxin: Phone 185 0025 5645, Email [email protected]