How China’s Telecom Giants Accelerate IT Efficiency with the DevOps Maturity Model

Overview

Amid large‑scale digital transformation, enterprises adopt DevOps to boost IT efficiency. The DevOps Capability Maturity Model series, led by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), provides strong guidance, and many industry‑leading telecom firms have leveraged it to assess and improve their IT capabilities.

Participating Telecom Companies

China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom, ZTE, Huawei, and China Tower – a total of six telecom enterprises – completed 33 assessments using the DevOps maturity model.

Continuous Delivery (Standard 3) Assessment

Zhejiang Mobile: OSS 4.0 Capability Centralized Performance Center

The OSS 4.0 platform focuses on enterprise‑level services and platform capabilities, following the principles of data unification, capability sinking, open integration, and application alignment. It supports unified data ingestion, modeling, and computation, enabling rapid, decoupled application development.

Zhejiang Mobile’s DevOps framework, dubbed “4321,” comprises four layers (standards, tools, platforms, models), three teams (network support, business SRE, frontline operations), two routes (internal build, external benchmarking), and one integrated operation.

Beijing Mobile: Two Projects

E‑commerce System – Built on the self‑developed AiDo platform, it combines visual metrics, pipeline orchestration, and layered automated testing to improve development efficiency and delivery quality.

Centralized Performance Management System – Implements micro‑service decoupling and container deployment, using a “thick middle‑platform, thin application” approach, data‑mid‑platform for collection and analysis, and technology‑mid‑platform for shared services.

Jiangsu Mobile: Aladdin Marketing Enablement Project

After achieving Level 3 continuous delivery, the team reduced delivery cycle by 45%, pre‑change time by 50%, change‑failure rate to below 5%, average build time to ~5 minutes, automated‑test coverage to 100%, and enabled on‑demand release frequency.

China Mobile Tower: Master Data Management Module

The module standardizes master data for the headquarters, covering organization, personnel, regions, suppliers, customers, and assets, exposing 115 APIs to 46 internal systems and managing ~30 GB of data.

Technical Operations (Standard 4) Assessment

Beijing Mobile: CRM Order Center Project

The order center, built on Kubernetes and Mesos/Marathon with OpenStack virtualization, supports elastic scaling, service governance, rate limiting, circuit breaking, and domain isolation, providing a complete service catalog and control interface.

Guangdong Mobile: CRM Customer Relationship Management System

The CRM system handles over 1.3 billion users and 90 billion monthly calls, covering customer, product, channel, and order management, illustrating its massive scale and complexity.

Security and Risk Management (Standard 6) Assessment

Inner Mongolia Mobile: Unified 4A System 3.0 (Pangu PaaS Platform)

The 4A system provides unified identity, authentication, authorization, and audit for all IT resources, addressing high‑security requirements across three domains (B, M, O) and integrating DevSecOps practices, secure development lifecycles, and automated security tooling.

System and Tools (Standard 8) Assessment

Zhejiang Mobile: Honeycloud Energy Efficiency Platform

The platform aligns with Zhejiang Mobile’s release control and architecture governance, integrating configuration management, automated build, and one‑click deployment across internal micro‑service platforms.

China Telecom Integration: Biyi Collaborative Development Platform

Based on micro‑services, it integrates Jenkins, Nexus, Harbor, SonarQube, and provides visual pipeline editing, full‑life‑cycle management, and cloud‑native deployment.

System Reliability and Continuity Engineering (Standard 14) Assessment

Beijing Mobile: SRE Transformation

Since December 2021, Beijing Mobile’s IS department has adopted SRE principles, establishing a four‑in‑one work model (technical guarantee, disaster recovery, intelligent operations, business support) and improving 13 capability sub‑domains, reducing incident count by 77% and duration by 54%.

Model Introduction

The DevOps Capability Maturity Model, jointly created by CAICT, the Cloud Computing Open‑Source Industry Alliance, the Efficient Operations Community, BATJ, and major financial and telecom enterprises, is the first comprehensive DevOps standard in China and has been adopted by many leading firms. It was officially concluded by the ITU‑T in July 2020 as the world’s first international DevOps standard.

The overall DevOps architecture includes processes (agile development management, continuous delivery, technical operations), application design, security and risk management, system and tools, business value management, collaborative development‑operations, continuous testing, performance measurement, platform engineering, and system reliability & continuity engineering.

Contact Information

China Academy of Information and Communications Technology – Liu Kaili (WeChat/Phone: 156 5078 6171, Email: [email protected])

China Academy of Information and Communications Technology – Bai Hanxiong (WeChat/Phone: 159 1076 9206, Email: [email protected])

Efficient Operations Community – Wei Huanxin (WeChat/Phone: 185 0025 5645, Email: [email protected])