How Zhejiang Mobile’s DevOps Platform Earned Top Scores in System & Tool Standards

Editor’s Note

Standardization and tooling are the foundation of organization‑level DevOps; only unified standards embedded in tools can minimize human error, reduce labor costs, and improve development and operations efficiency and quality.

Event Overview

On September 25, 2020, the 14th GOPS Global Operations Conference was held in Shenzhen, jointly organized by the Open Source Cloud Alliance (OSCAR), GreatOPS, and OOPSA. The conference announced the first batch of evaluation results for the DevOps standard system and tool components.

Assessment Result

Zhejiang Mobile’s “Bee Cloud Energy‑Efficiency Platform” passed the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology’s (CAICT) DevOps Capability Maturity Model assessment, receiving an “Excellent” rating for the Build and Continuous Integration module, indicating a leading domestic level.

Interview with Ren Gan

Ren Gan, Deputy General Manager of the IT Department at China Mobile Zhejiang, shared the background of Zhejiang Mobile, its scale (19,000 employees, assets over 93 billion CNY), and the IT department’s role in building an enterprise‑grade, cloud‑native PAAS platform that drives digital transformation.

The Bee Cloud platform serves as the company’s primary build and continuous integration platform, offering one‑stop application onboarding, agile development support, and one‑click release capabilities that significantly improve development efficiency and enable reliable, high‑speed continuous delivery.

Key Insights from the Q&A

Feelings about the evaluation: The excellent rating validates Zhejiang Mobile’s transition from traditional development to an efficient DevOps model and confirms the team’s contribution.

Importance of an end‑to‑end toolchain: A unified, automated toolchain enhances delivery speed and quality, reduces complexity, and accelerates digital transformation.

Enterprise considerations: DevOps is a national‑level digital‑transformation strategy; Zhejiang Mobile leads the group’s DevOps practice and aims to share outcomes across the entire China Mobile ecosystem.

Changes after assessment: Systematic evaluation clarified the DevOps baseline, identified gaps, and drove targeted improvements, resulting in higher delivery capability and adoption of best practices.

Improvement outcomes: The platform now supports over 400 internal systems, manages more than 1,500 application environments, executes over 10,000 builds and 1,000 releases monthly, maintains ~5,000 pipelines with nearly 670,000 executions, reduces build time from 30 minutes to 5 minutes, and increases release frequency from twice a month to 4‑8 times.

Design highlights: The platform aligns with Zhejiang Mobile’s architecture governance, integrates configuration from an internal config center, and automates service registration, cache refresh, and one‑stop deployment.

Challenges and solutions: Cross‑team coordination, rapid gap‑analysis, and agile iteration were addressed through focused meetings, multi‑department collaboration, and same‑day releases for urgent improvements.

Future plans: Increase deployment frequency, adopt low‑risk release strategies such as blue‑green, canary, and rolling upgrades, and extend DevOps governance to the full software lifecycle.

Vision for DevOps: As a key enabler of digital transformation, DevOps will become a universal management practice, evolving with industry‑specific requirements.

Platform Visuals

DevOps Capability Maturity Model

The model, led by CAICT with contributions from OSCAR, GreatOPS, BATJ, and major telecom and finance enterprises, is the first domestic and international DevOps standard series, officially concluded by ITU‑T in July 2020. It covers agile management, continuous delivery, technical operations, application design, security, risk management, and system‑and‑tool components.