How China Air Achieved Dual DevOps Certification and Level‑3 Continuous Delivery

On May 29, 2024, China’s central authorities issued the Information Technology Standard Construction Action Plan (2024‑2027) , urging participation in international standards bodies such as ISO, IEC and ITU, and promoting alignment between international and domestic standards.

The China Academy of Information and Communications (CAICT) launched a synchronized assessment based on the ITU DevOps international standard and the domestic DevOps Capability Maturity Model , providing a unified certification pathway.

Interview Overview

We interviewed Fu Guangyu, senior manager of the Software Development Center, and He Yuan, senior R&D engineer, from China International Airlines (Air China) to discuss their experience with the assessment.

Project Background

Air China’s Digital Dispatch Release Sub‑system is a core production‑control system that aims to digitize, automate and intelligently manage flight dispatch processes.

Assessment Outcome

The subsystem successfully passed the ITU DevOps international assessment and the domestic Continuous Delivery Level‑3 evaluation, marking a transition to a domestically leading capability level. Compared with the 2025 Level‑2 assessment of the new‑retail refund system, the current project demonstrates:

Demand delivery cycle reduced from >3 weeks to 2 weeks.

Build time shortened from 20 minutes to roughly 10 minutes.

Interface test success rate reaching 95%.

Support for weekly production releases.

Motivation for Joining the Assessment

Air China joined the assessment for three main reasons:

Digital transformation demands – DevOps accelerates the shift from project‑based delivery to product‑oriented operations.

Standard‑based roadmap – the DevOps Capability Maturity Model provides a clear path to a stable, agile, secure and transparent technical system.

Assessment‑driven improvement – the CAICT evaluation serves as a “health check” to pinpoint blind spots, guide precise enhancements, and support systematic R&D efficiency.

Benefits Gained

The assessment yielded three major benefits for the enterprise and the team:

Process optimization: clarified and standardized R&D‑operations workflows.

Improvement guidance: actionable feedback enabled continuous DevOps capability upgrades.

Industry impact: enhanced Air China’s visibility in the sector, creating more opportunities for knowledge sharing.

Team collaboration and efficiency also improved, and a reusable set of best‑practice patterns was documented for future projects.

System Design and Architecture

The system follows four design principles driven by business needs, emphasizing high cohesion and low coupling:

Business‑driven architecture: real‑time, accurate, consistent data handling with uninterrupted operation.

Micro‑service architecture: guided by a five‑level requirement hierarchy and domain‑driven design, implemented with K8s and Spring Cloud, supporting health checks, auto‑recovery, rolling, gray and blue‑green deployments.

Deep ecosystem integration: APIs and SDKs connect to more than ten surrounding systems (communication platform, flight‑plan system, GIS, etc.) via standardized interfaces.

Full‑life‑cycle DevOps management: the unified Air China DevOps platform handles CI, CD and continuous delivery, enabling blue‑green/gray zero‑downtime releases. The tech stack includes Spring Cloud, OpenJDK, MyBatis and Vue 3, all running in a containerized environment.

Embedding DevOps from the outset, rather than retrofitting it, made the Level‑3 assessment attainable.

Challenges and Solutions

The assessment highlighted two major challenges:

Change‑process rigor: manual interventions, incomplete records, and limited traceability.

Tool‑platform limitations: insufficient automation in test analysis and performance measurement.

To address them, Air China adopted a “process first, platform improvement” strategy:

Standardized change procedures, added demand‑change linkage, refined rollback manuals, codified code‑review checklists and commit‑log formats, ensuring “evidence‑based, traceable” operations.

Deeply revamped the DevOps platform: added detailed automated test analysis, redesigned metric data models, and enabled drill‑down views by service, branch and time, covering deployment frequency, lead time, mean time to repair, and pipeline red‑light resolution time.

Future Plans

Air China intends to:

Deepen DevOps practice across more projects.

Strengthen collaboration with leading industry peers.

Integrate AI with DevOps, exploring large‑model‑assisted rule generation, AIOps‑based fault prediction, and intelligent development, testing and operations.

These steps aim to further boost R&D efficiency and support the airline’s digital and intelligent transformation.

Industry Landscape

As of April 17, 2026, the civil‑aviation sector’s participation in the domestic DevOps assessment is shown in the accompanying chart, with counts for Continuous Delivery Level 2/3, Technical Operations Level 2/2+, and BizDevOps Level 3.

Standard Overviews

The ITU DevOps international standard (ITU‑T Y.3525) originated from a 2018 Geneva meeting led by CAICT, involving representatives from over 20 countries. The domestic DevOps Capability Maturity Model was co‑created by CAICT, cloud‑computing alliances, major internet firms and financial, telecom and other enterprises, and has been adopted by numerous organizations.

For further details, refer to the CAICT BizDevOps and ITU DevOps standard documentation.