How China Agricultural Bank Earned Level‑3 DevOps Application Design Certification

Standardization and tool empowerment are identified as key factors for enterprise success, with DevOps standards and continuous delivery pipelines significantly improving quality, efficiency, and market competitiveness.

2022 DevOps Standards Evaluation Announcement

On December 26, 2022, the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) announced the latest batch of DevOps and AIOps standard evaluations.

Agricultural Bank of China Passes Level‑3 Evaluation

The Agricultural Bank of China (ABC) participated in the evaluation with its "Distributed Core Customer Information Cloud Migration" project, successfully achieving a Level‑3 assessment under CAICT’s DevOps Capability Maturity Model – Application Design Standard , indicating a leading domestic capability.

ABC is the first and currently the only bank to pass the Level‑3 Application Design assessment, and has completed 17 DevOps standard evaluations overall, including 12 continuous delivery, 1 application design, and 4 security and risk management assessments.

The award ceremony was scheduled for January 6, 2023 at the “2022 GOLF+ IT New Governance Leadership Forum”.

Interview Highlights

Q: Please introduce your organization and the evaluated project.

Yan Xiaolin, Deputy Chief Engineer of ABC’s R&D Center, explained that the bank is a state‑owned commercial bank serving over 800 million customers, pursuing digital transformation with a focus on safety, innovation, and openness. The evaluated project unifies customer information across the bank, using a micro‑service architecture to achieve decoupling, high availability, and rapid business growth.

Q: How does the DevOps Application Design Standard define capability?

The standard evaluates six capability sub‑domains: scalability, elasticity, testability, observability, availability, and security, aligning technical architecture with agile development, continuous delivery, and risk management goals.

Q: What motivated ABC to join the DevOps standard evaluation?

Yan noted that the CAICT DevOps standards cover the entire software value stream, matching the bank’s digital transformation needs. Since 2020, ABC has already passed the Level‑3 Continuous Delivery assessment, demonstrating leading capabilities.

Q: What benefits has the evaluation brought?

The assessment provided a detailed benchmark across ~35 capability items and ~200 checkpoints, helping the team identify gaps, improve development efficiency, delivery speed, and operational stability, and set an industry benchmark.

Q: Describe the project’s technical architecture.

The system adopts a cloud‑native micro‑service design with domain‑driven decomposition (corporate, personal, public services, contracts). It leverages a unified development framework, DevOps quality‑gate pipelines, distributed gateways, service registries, configuration centers, and an enterprise‑grade operation platform for automated change management, monitoring, and fault handling. Cloud services provide service discovery, container scaling, and distributed database disaster recovery, fulfilling the six standard sub‑domains.

Q: What challenges were encountered?

Improving observability was a major hurdle. The team refined alarm content to include error codes, interfaces, threads, and classes, and built a data‑analysis platform to aggregate logs, metrics, and call relationships, enabling multi‑dimensional fault localization and intelligent root‑cause analysis.

Q: What are the future plans?

ABC will continue to deepen continuous delivery, expand DevOps assessments externally, and propagate DevOps capabilities to branches, while further enhancing the six capability sub‑domains.

Q: Outlook for DevOps?

According to Liu Guoxing, DevOps fosters collaboration between development and operations, dramatically improving quality, agility, and security, and is expected to see broader adoption across enterprises.

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