How China Southern Airlines Accelerated Delivery with DevOps: A Real‑World Case Study

Domestic large‑scale enterprises have proven that standardization and tool empowerment are key to success. The CAICT DevOps standards and the associated continuous delivery pipeline platform can significantly improve quality and efficiency, enhancing market competitiveness.

China Information & Communications Research Institute (CAICT) released the "R&D Operations Integration (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model" series standards, which guide enterprises in implementing DevOps. Banks, securities, insurance, telecom, and internet companies have participated in CAICT assessments, improving their IT capabilities.

On April 25, 2024, the 2024 GOPS Global Operations Conference in Shenzhen announced the latest DevOps assessment results. China Southern Airlines (CSN) submitted two projects—Enterprise Business Travel Platform (BTRIP) and the PaaS Operations Management System (POMS)—both achieving Level 2 of the Continuous Delivery Standard, indicating advanced domestic capability.

1. Project Overview

China Southern Airlines, headquartered in Guangzhou, is the largest airline in China by fleet size and passenger volume. The airline has been pursuing digital transformation for years and actively participates in CAICT’s BizDevOps standard development.

The BTRIP platform provides a one‑stop solution for corporate travel management, integrating online registration, product purchase, and travel administration to improve efficiency and user experience. The POMS project builds a unified, standardized service‑side technology platform to automate and standardize operations, enhancing the precision of platform management for development teams.

2. Project Features

Both projects adopted agile development, continuous integration, and continuous deployment from the planning stage, enabling rapid market response, higher software quality, and optimized user experience. Automated builds and tests ensure code stability, while continuous deployment streamlines release processes.

3. Improvement Outcomes

The assessment led to the implementation of a DevOps platform with pipelines for build‑on‑commit, CI, and release, significantly boosting development and delivery efficiency. Detailed results are shown in the diagram below.

4. Challenges and Solutions

The assessment faced tight timelines, heavy workload, and high standards. A dedicated DevOps task force reorganized priorities, shifted from monthly to weekly iterations, and completed all capability indicators, passing the evaluation.

Regular communication, training, and knowledge‑sharing mechanisms clarified standards, reduced misunderstandings, and improved team consistency.

5. Significance of the Assessment

Passing the DevOps Continuous Delivery Standard demonstrates that CSN’s DevOps capabilities are at an industry‑leading level, enabling faster, higher‑quality software delivery and stronger market competitiveness.

6. Future Plans

CSN will continue to optimize its DevOps toolchain, enhance continuous delivery capabilities, improve technical operations, and promote end‑to‑end value delivery to support ongoing digital transformation.

Industry Participation Overview

As of April 25, 2024, numerous civil aviation enterprises have taken part in the DevOps maturity model assessment, with varying levels of achievement across continuous delivery, technical operations, and security standards.

DevOps Capability Maturity Model

The model, jointly developed by CAICT, the Cloud Computing Open Source Alliance, the Efficient Operations Community, BATJ, and leading enterprises, defines processes such as agile management, continuous delivery, technical operations, security, system and tool management, business value management, and reliability engineering. The standard (ITU‑T Y.3525) is recognized internationally.