Enterprise‑Scale DevOps Secrets from China’s Top Banks Revealed

Guided by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) and jointly launched by the Cloud Computing Open Source Industry Alliance and the Open Operations Alliance, the Enterprise‑Level DevOps Empowerment (Co‑promotion) Program held its first corporate exchange meeting on May 24, 2019 in Chengdu, hosted at the China Merchants Bank Financial Backend Service Center.

Participants included experts from the first batch of member enterprises such as Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, Bank of China Software Center, Agricultural Bank of China, China Merchants Bank, Ping An Technology, Beijing Mobile, China Unicom Software Research Institute, Huatai Securities, Anxin Securities, and others, as well as interested companies like Zhejiang Mobile, Guangdong Mobile, Xinwang Bank, Jinzheng Technology, Yufu Technology, and China Mobile Information.

CAICT expert Niu Xiaoling introduced the background of the program, which aims to create more exchange opportunities for domestic and foreign enterprises, collect outstanding cases, and share them widely.

China Merchants Bank shared its DevOps journey. Chen Zhanwen described how the bank began exploring DevOps in 2014, started formal research in 2015, piloted results in 2016, and continuously refined tools, leading to a comprehensive DevOps platform that fully rolled out in 2018, supporting an end‑to‑end workflow.

Xie Qinmu presented the bank’s K8s‑based DevOps pipeline that supports multiple technology stacks, covering construction background, containerized and non‑containerized solutions, and future plans.

The bank’s system consists of core systems and an open platform; due to numerous projects, container technology was adopted to address delivery challenges. The pipeline handles dynamic scaling of both slave and master nodes, while the non‑containerized solution reuses a master pool to support various OSes and minimize environment dependencies.

Currently, the pipeline processes over 17,000 builds across more than 20 scenarios, with roughly half containerized and half non‑containerized, achieving an average build time of 12.6 minutes using about nine physical servers.

The interactive session allowed experts to pose problems from their own enterprises and receive collective solutions. Based on the DevOps Capability Maturity Model, issues were categorized into seven capability domains such as configuration management, continuous integration, testing, deployment, environment, data, and metrics.

Q1: How to establish traceability between local legacy projects and requirements?

A Tencent expert suggested using a requirement‑code mapping rule (BAG) during code submission, ensuring each commit includes the requirement ID, enabling straightforward lookup via logs.

Q2: How to measure DevOps effectiveness compared to traditional models?

A Baidu expert emphasized defining standards for each development phase, creating internal metrics for practices like incremental code checks and security reviews, and using automated tools within the pipeline to enforce and visualize these metrics.

Q3: How to handle business requirements that conflict with integration constraints?

The discussion highlighted risk management when multiple applications share an environment, recommending coordinated testing strategies and unified test items to mitigate interference.

Through this event, participating enterprises gained practical insights from China Merchants Bank’s DevOps platform, asked specific questions, and received expert answers, fulfilling the program’s goal of fostering communication and elevating DevOps capabilities across companies.

For more information about the Enterprise‑Level DevOps Empowerment Program, contact:

Che Xin, CAICT – [email protected] – 186 1113 9904

Yang Donghui, GreatOps Community – [email protected] – 185 1511 5139