How a Major Bank Accelerates Cloud‑Native Adoption with KubeVela

Xu Jiahang, a maintainer of the KubeVela open‑source project and a senior developer in the Cloud Platform and Operations team at China Merchants Bank (CMB), shares the bank’s journey toward cloud‑native application management.

He explains that KubeVela, originated by Alibaba Cloud and now a CNCF Sandbox project, provides a modern software delivery platform based on the Open Application Model (OAM). It enables declarative, multi‑cloud application deployment, which aligns with CMB’s need for reliable, efficient, and observable workloads across heterogeneous runtimes such as mainframes, bare metal, VMs, containers, and FaaS.

The bank’s motivations include:

Reducing the cognitive load caused by diverse runtime environments.

Managing increasing micro‑service complexity and distributed architectures.

Meeting strict observability, availability, and security requirements in the financial sector.

To achieve a smooth transition, Xu outlines four practical guidelines:

Integrate existing enterprise tools (e.g., application onboarding and migration) to ensure compatibility with current workflows.

Address legacy challenges such as dependency management (e.g., VMService).

Provide high‑value capabilities like application observability and SLO tracking.

Embed best‑practice implementations directly into the platform, lowering the learning curve for users.

Technically, CMB customizes four core components of KubeVela—Vela‑UX, Vela‑APIServer, Vela‑Core, and Addons—by maintaining core, adapting the UI, extending the API server, and adding enterprise‑specific addons (cron tasks, MySQL, Flink, observability SLOs, etc.). These contributions are fed back to the upstream community, including GC strategies, workflow policies, and CRD scope definitions.

Xu emphasizes the importance of joining a vibrant open‑source community: a project’s vitality and longevity are crucial for enterprise adoption. He notes that KubeVela’s rapid evolution, especially after version 1.2, matches CMB’s requirements, and the bank plans to share its experiences at KubeCon North America.

Resources for further exploration include the KubeVela code repository ( github.com/oam-dev/kubevela), official documentation (kubevela.io), and community channels such as CNCF Slack and the project’s DingTalk and WeChat groups.