How China Aviation’s Flight Management System Earned Top DevOps Maturity

In the context of digital transformation, enterprises in China are adopting DevOps to improve IT efficiency. The "China DevOps Status Survey Report (2023)" shows that DevOps transformation continued in 2023, with enhanced agility, continuous delivery, and a rise in maturity; about 60% of companies have reached a comprehensive DevOps maturity level.

The "R&D Operations Integration (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model" series of standards, led by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), has been adopted as an international DevOps standard (ITU‑T Y.3525) since July 2020. Over the past six years, the assessment has covered more than 20 industries and more than a hundred enterprises have passed the DevOps standard evaluation.

China Aviation Becomes the First Civil‑Aviation Enterprise to Participate in the CAICT DevOps Evaluation

The evaluated project is the "Flight Management System", which successfully passed the CAICT technical‑operation standard at level 2+.

The system adopts domain‑driven design, builds a domain model, and partitions micro‑services accordingly. It runs on a cloud‑computing platform with a distributed database architecture, enabling rapid application‑ and database‑level scaling to handle traffic spikes. Failures in some databases or application clusters do not affect overall external services, and automatic or one‑click isolation, multi‑dimensional throttling, and automatic circuit‑breaking ensure robust distributed‑system service capability.

During the assessment, the project team continuously iterated the seven technical‑operation capability domains, such as linking monitoring alerts, event management, and emergency response into automated workflows, improving self‑healing rates; establishing closed‑loop configuration and capacity management to enhance data completeness and accuracy; applying event management in multiple production scenarios; and achieving fine‑grained operation through inter‑platform connectivity.

Overview of the DevOps Capability Maturity Model

The DevOps Capability Maturity Model series, jointly developed by CAICT, the Cloud Computing Open‑Source Industry Alliance, the Efficient Operations Community, BATJ, and leading enterprises in finance, communications, and the internet, provides strong authority and industry guidance. The standards have been released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and adopted by many leading firms.

The model, finalized in July 2020 by the United Nations‑affiliated ITU‑T, divides the overall DevOps architecture into process (agile development management, continuous delivery, technical operation), application design, security and risk management, system and tools, business value management, collaborative development‑operation, continuous testing, performance measurement, platform engineering, and system reliability and continuity engineering.