Sany Group’s Cloud‑Native Technical Mid‑Platform: “3+1+N” Architecture and Digital Transformation

Since 2020, the Cloud Native Technology Practice Alliance (CNBPA) has been collecting outstanding cloud‑native practice cases from its members; after sharing seven cases last year, the community continues to showcase new industry examples to inspire digital adoption.

Sany Group, the largest Chinese and the world’s fifth‑largest construction‑machinery manufacturer, has long been at the forefront of digital transformation in traditional manufacturing and early incorporated container, DevOps, and micro‑service technologies into its strategic roadmap.

In 2020 the company launched a technology mid‑platform project, constructing three core platforms—container cloud, micro‑service governance, and DevOps—to achieve infrastructure agility, integrated development‑operations, and service‑oriented operations, thereby establishing an agile development system for future cloud‑native decoupling.

The legacy architecture suffered from monolithic codebases, lengthy approval processes (≈2 days), slow packaging (≈30 minutes), and month‑long demand response cycles, severely limiting business efficiency.

Existing container platforms exhibited stability and maintainability issues, while DevOps tools were fragmented across projects, and internal development frameworks lacked unified governance and permission control.

Standardized development processes, agile management norms, CI/CD pipelines, and micro‑service development/testing standards were missing, hindering the effective adoption of DevOps and micro‑service concepts.

Additionally, the coexistence of old and new systems created integration challenges, and future cloud‑based reconstruction and migration require comprehensive solutions and standard procedures.

The project follows a “3+1+N” construction goal: “3” refers to the three platforms (DevOps, micro‑service governance, container cloud), “1” to a unified agile development system based on pipeline operations, and “N” to numerous applications that pilot the agile process and gradually migrate to the mid‑platform.

Built on a Kubernetes‑based cloud‑native stack, the platform provides a high‑availability architecture with three master nodes, active‑standby design, data backup, dual‑active data centers, and disaster recovery, while supporting elastic scaling for thousands of containers and pods.

Performance optimizations include distributed storage with read/write splitting and sharding, distributed computing with load balancing, and the Kube‑OVN network plugin that enables container‑level network acceleration, supporting over 10,000 pods per cluster and achieving more than double the single‑core throughput.

Security measures meet OWASP standards, featuring image scanning, role‑based access control, TLS encryption, port‑level security, and full‑traffic container mirroring for network protection.

After deployment, the platform boosted business agility and development efficiency, reduced IT construction and operation costs, and improved quality; development cycles shrank from months to days, resource utilization rose from 10.2 % to 30 %, service availability reached 99.75 %, pipelines support 5,000 concurrent users, and environment provisioning time dropped from 3 days to 0.8 days, cutting code duplication and error rates by 90 %.

The solution integrated single sign‑on, BPM, and PMS systems, established a comprehensive agile development framework, and created a training and assessment system for the mid‑platform technology.

For the equipment‑manufacturing sector, Sany’s mid‑platform serves as a benchmark for digital and intelligent transformation, with future goals of achieving 3 trillion CNY output, hiring 3,000 modern industry workers and 30,000 R&D staff, and fully evolving into a digital technology enterprise supported by Tencent Cloud and Lingque Cloud.

Related case links:

01 案例成果展 ｜ 云原生成为工业互联网新引擎 共同赋能制造业转型升级

02 案例成果展 | 利星行机械Kubernetes平台持久化存储

03 案例成果展 | 一汽集团云原生实践：企业智能化、数字化转型的有力支撑

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