How China’s Aviation IT System Earned a Leading DevOps 2+ Certification

China Information and Communication Research Institute (CAICT) released a series of DevOps capability maturity models that guide enterprises in implementing standardized DevOps practices. In December 2023, CAICT announced the results of the latest DevOps and AIOps assessments at the GOLF+ IT New Governance Leadership Forum in Beijing.

The flight management system of China Civil Aviation Information Network Co., Ltd. (China Hangxin) successfully passed the CAICT "Research and Development Operations Integration (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model" Technical Operations Level 2+ evaluation, marking the first DevOps standard certification in the civil aviation sector and reaching a domestic leading level.

Assessment Details

Evaluation conducted by CAICT, with officials from the China Communications Standardization Association and CAICT’s Cloud Computing and Big Data Institute presenting the award.

Q&A with Project Leaders

Q: Please introduce the project you evaluated.

A (Xing Tongkun, Deputy General Manager): The flight management system is one of the three core systems of the Passenger Service System (PSS), handling massive concurrent online transactions with high complexity, real‑time requirements, and stringent safety and reliability standards. It supports flight planning, queries, inventory control, seat map management, and passenger itinerary assurance, enabling airlines to improve efficiency, redesign processes, and control revenue.

The system, built on China Hangxin’s proprietary cloud computing platform, peaks at over 10,000 transactions per second with an average inventory calculation response time under 5 ms, serving billions of passenger interactions annually.

Q: How did you decide to submit this project for the technical operations assessment?

A: We chose a system that is representative in business importance, technical complexity, and maturity. The flight management system, built on a cloud‑native architecture, already has mature monitoring, incident response, change management, and capacity management practices aligned with SRE principles, making it ideal for showcasing and further improving our operations.

Q: What improvements resulted from the assessment?

A (Li Ning, Senior Open‑System Operations Engineer): The cross‑departmental team collaborated intensively for six months, achieving recognition of our processes, standards, tools, and organization. We enhanced automation in monitoring, alerting, and incident handling, improved configuration and capacity management, refined event management across production scenarios, and achieved finer‑grained operational control through platform integration.

Q: How is the system architected?

A: The system follows Domain‑Driven Design, decomposing business domains into micro‑services. It runs on a cloud computing platform with a distributed database, supporting rapid horizontal scaling, fault isolation, multi‑dimensional rate limiting, and automatic circuit breaking, ensuring high availability for the distributed environment.

Q: What is your view on the DevOps standard?

A: DevOps has become an industry consensus for guiding IT system construction, promoting automation across development, testing, deployment, and operation, and improving product lifecycle quality. The standard emphasizes digital and platform‑based methods to continuously elevate operational efficiency.

DevOps Capability Maturity Model Overview

The CAICT DevOps standards, jointly developed with leading internet, finance, and telecom companies, are the first comprehensive DevOps series standards in China and have been adopted by many enterprises after being released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. In July 2020, the standards were finalized by the ITU‑T, becoming the world’s first international DevOps standard.

The model covers agile development management, continuous delivery, technical operations, DevSecOps, system and tool assessment, business value management, collaborative development and operations, continuous testing, performance measurement, platform engineering, and reliability engineering (SRE).

For further information, contact CAICT at [email protected] (tel: 156 5078 6171) or [email protected] (tel: 159 1076 9206), and the GreatOps community at [email protected] (tel: 185 0025 5645).