How a Chinese Insurer Built a Scalable Microservices Platform with DevOps
This article details how PICC Life Insurance designed and implemented a distributed microservices platform using Spring Cloud, Apollo, ELK, and DevOps pipelines to improve performance, reliability, and development efficiency, illustrating the architecture, technology stack, CI/CD process, and operational benefits.
Introduction
In 2018 PICC Life Insurance embarked on a micro‑services platform project. The article shares the motivations behind the initiative and how DevOps was applied to turn the platform into a productivity booster for the enterprise.
Project Background
The insurance industry now faces high‑frequency, fragmented, and scenario‑driven transactions, demanding higher system capacity, business continuity, rapid response to requirements, and faster operations. To meet these challenges, PICC Life needed a standardized, distributed application platform.
Platform Technology Stack and Architecture
The platform is built on Spring Cloud components: Eureka for service registration, Feign for service calls, Ribbon for client‑side load balancing, Hystrix for circuit breaking, rate limiting, and degradation. Configuration is managed by Apollo, with monitoring via Hystrix‑Dashboard and Turbine.
Logging and monitoring use the ELK stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana). Continuous integration and deployment are powered by DevOps tools combined with Maven and Git/SVN.
Architecture Overview
API Gateway for unified API management.
Micro‑service platform handling registration, discovery, load balancing, configuration, and monitoring.
PaaS layer providing shared middleware services.
Management portal offering visual configuration, authorization, and log monitoring.
DevOps engine for automated build and deployment.
SDK scaffolding and development guidelines to lower entry barriers.
Process and standards ensuring lifecycle governance.
CI/CD with DevOps
The DevOps pipeline automates code checkout (Git/SVN), builds (Maven, Ant, Gradle, npm), quality analysis (SonarQube), and deployment (remote scripts). Build tasks are categorized into compilation, testing, packaging, and auxiliary tools, enabling flexible pipeline composition and trigger strategies.
Conclusion
Since the platform’s launch, multiple PICC Life projects—including integrated, WeChat, and big‑data initiatives—have adopted DevOps, achieving hundreds of daily builds, higher efficiency, and strong customer approval. Ongoing work focuses on further pipeline orchestration and tighter integration between DevOps and the distributed platform.
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