How China’s Telecom Leaders Boost IT Efficiency Using the DevOps Maturity Model
Across China’s telecom sector, leading operators such as China Mobile, China Unicom, and China Telecom have leveraged the CAICT‑led DevOps Capability Maturity Model to assess dozens of projects, achieving faster delivery cycles, higher automation, standardized interfaces, and improved IT efficiency through continuous delivery, technical operation, and system‑tool integration.
DevOps Capability Maturity Model Overview
In the context of digital transformation, enterprises adopt DevOps to improve IT efficiency. The “R&D Operations Integration (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model” series, led by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), provides guidance for evaluating and advancing DevOps capabilities across industries.
Industry Adoption in the Telecom Sector
Leading telecom operators—including China Unicom, China Mobile, China Telecom, Huawei, China Tower, and ZTE—have collectively completed 18 DevOps maturity assessments, covering projects such as OSS 4.0 performance centers, e‑commerce platforms, marketing empowerment tools, one‑card recharge systems, and master data management modules.
Zhejiang Mobile – OSS 4.0 Performance Center
Built on the OSS 4.0 architecture, the performance center unifies data ingestion, modeling, and computation to support network business analytics. The project also defines a “4321” DevOps operating model (four layers, three teams, two lines, one integration) to drive continuous improvement.
Beijing Mobile – E‑commerce and Centralized Performance Management
The AiDo platform enables visual metric control, pipeline orchestration, and layered automated testing, boosting development efficiency and delivery quality. The centralized performance management system adopts micro‑service decoupling, container deployment, and a “thick middle‑platform, thin application” strategy, integrating GIS, UIUE, AI components, and providing capabilities such as alarm derivation and dispatch.
Jiangsu Mobile – Alading Marketing Empowerment
After achieving Level 3 continuous delivery assessment, the team reduced delivery cycle by 45%, change lead time by 50%, failure rate below 5%, average build time to ~5 minutes, test coverage to 100%, and enabled on‑demand release frequency.
China Unicom – One‑Card Recharge Project
Standardized interfaces across 31 provinces eliminated duplicate development, reduced software heterogeneity, and, combined with DevOps management, significantly lowered software management costs while improving development efficiency.
Inner Mongolia Mobile – ESOP System
The ESOP portal consolidates multiple business platforms, achieving a 25% reduction in demand delivery cycle, 50% reduction in version cycle, 300% increase in integration efficiency, and test coverage up to 95%.
China Tower – Master Data Management Module
The module provides 115 APIs, serves 46 internal systems, and manages ~30 GB of data, enhancing data governance and enabling traceable, measurable software production processes.
Technical Operation (Standard 4) Highlights
Beijing Mobile – CRM Order Center
The project runs on a fully cloud‑native stack (K8s, Mesos+Marathon, OpenStack) and the AIF framework, delivering service governance features such as auto‑scaling, rate limiting, circuit breaking, and domain isolation.
System and Tool (Standard 8) Highlights
Zhejiang Mobile – Bee Cloud Energy Efficiency Platform
The platform aligns with internal architecture governance, automating build, CI, and deployment processes, and integrates configuration management and cache refresh to achieve one‑stop rapid release.
China Telecom – Integrated Biyi Collaborative R&D Platform
Based on a micro‑service architecture, the platform integrates Jenkins, Nexus, Harbor, SonarQube and other DevOps tools, offering visual pipeline editing, full‑process monitoring, and a cloud‑native, end‑to‑end software lifecycle.
Standardization and International Recognition
The DevOps Capability Maturity Model series is the first domestic and international DevOps standard, jointly developed by CAICT, the Cloud Computing Open Source Industry Alliance, leading internet companies, and major financial and telecom enterprises. In July 2020, the standard was ratified by the ITU‑T, becoming the world’s first DevOps International Standard. Its assessment framework covers agile development management, continuous delivery, technical operation, application design, security and risk management, and system‑tool integration.
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