How CAICT’s SRE Standards Strengthen System Reliability and Continuity

Why System Stability Matters

Recent high‑profile outages both domestically and abroad have made system stability a hot industry topic. Incidents such as a cooling‑system failure at a data center in March 2023, a 55‑minute global service disruption in May 2023, and prolonged downtimes of online document tools and ride‑hailing apps illustrate the severe business impact of unreliable systems.

With rapid digital transformation, the importance of information systems is increasing, while the number of systems and the scale of business continue to grow, creating new challenges for operations.

Characteristic 1: Large‑scale, distributed architectures are replacing monolithic designs.

Characteristic 2: High‑frequency changes driven by new business launches and online promotions.

Characteristic 3: Complex technology stacks involving diverse open‑source tools, operating systems, middleware, and virtualization platforms.

Characteristic 4: Massive traffic and high concurrency due to mobile‑internet growth.

Regulatory Background

China’s State Council Order No. 745, the “Regulations on the Security Protection of Critical Information Infrastructure,” took effect on September 1 2021, requiring operators to adopt technical protection measures, respond to security incidents, and ensure data integrity, confidentiality, and availability.

CAICT SRE Framework

In response, the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) launched a comprehensive upgrade of the “Research and Development Operations System Reliability and Continuity Engineering (SRE)” framework in 2020. The new framework consists of two main parts: reliability assurance in the development process and reliability assurance on the operational side.

1. Development‑Process Reliability Assurance

This part focuses on the software lifecycle, covering design and development, quality assurance, and deployment/release.

Design & Development – Stability admission reviews, architecture assessments, and capacity planning ensure that systems meet SRE‑defined production‑readiness criteria before release.

Quality Assurance – Continuous testing (unit, integration, functional, performance) and code‑quality checks, including pre‑merge reviews, maintain high reliability.

Deployment & Release – Automated deployment pipelines, version control, and gray‑release strategies reduce risk and improve availability.

2. Operational Reliability Assurance

This part addresses the fault‑lifecycle and steady‑state operation, divided into fault prevention, observation, handling, and optimization.

Fault Prevention – Change management, health inspections, emergency plans, chaos engineering, and performance‑capacity planning mitigate risks before they occur.

Fault Observation – Observability of operational data (metrics, logs, traces) and intelligent alarm aggregation enable early detection.

Fault Handling – Rapid response, precise fault location, and mitigation actions (rate‑limiting, traffic shifting, rollback, scaling) restore services quickly.

Optimization & Improvement – Post‑mortem analysis, continuous operation metrics, and data‑driven optimizations enhance long‑term stability.

SRE Standard Levels

The SRE standard defines four maturity levels (Level 1 to Level 4), each with increasing requirements for processes, automation, capacity planning, and digital transformation.

Case Study: Beijing Mobile

At the 2023 GOPS Global Operations Conference, CAICT announced that Beijing Mobile became the first telecom company to pass the SRE standard assessment. The evaluation showed significant improvements across thirteen capability sub‑domains, including broader SLO coverage, integrated business and system metrics, and a 77 % reduction in incident count with a 54 % decrease in incident duration compared to the previous year.

2024 Assessment Launch

The first batch of 2024 SRE maturity assessments is now open for registration, running from April to June with results to be published in July. Enterprises are invited to submit applications via email to the contacts listed.