How Huatai Securities Achieved Leading DevOps 2+ Maturity: A Case Study

Based on a McKinsey study, technology companies succeed through standardization and tool empowerment. The GOPS Global Operations Conference in Shanghai announced that Huatai Securities became the first and only company to pass the DevOps Technical Operations 2+ level assessment.

Interview Highlights

Q: How do you evaluate the assessment? Chen Dong: Huatai Securities is a technology‑driven securities group that has heavily invested in IT to make technology its core competitive advantage. After a year‑and‑a‑half of work, we optimized more than 300 capability items and achieved the 2+ maturity level, which brought significant benefits such as integrated run‑time assurance, intelligent monitoring, AIOps anomaly detection, and large‑scale chaos engineering.

Q: What are the concrete benefits? 1. Integrated run‑time assurance capabilities have been markedly enhanced, with monitoring, change, and incident management unified across trading, market data, wealth management, and accounts. 2. Breakthroughs in key operational areas, including intelligent monitoring (AIOps received a comprehensive award) and large‑scale chaos engineering (advanced‑level evaluation). 3. Accelerated transformation from traditional operations to technology‑operations, exemplified by the Digital Huatai Operations Command Center and standardized, online 82‑item service catalog.

Q: What is the evaluated project? Tian Jiang: The project is the “Zhangle Wealth‑Pass Market Data Service,” a core system supporting the Zhangle Wealth‑Pass mobile app, which provides real‑time market data for A‑shares, Hong Kong stocks, global indices, and futures to the largest retail‑client app in the securities industry.

Q: How was the project designed? Qiu Peng: The service features high availability (multi‑active deployment across regions and clouds), scalability (horizontal expansion for traffic spikes), low coupling (independent market deployments), and high performance (supporting over 5 trillion market data points per second).

Q: What challenges were faced during assessment? We tackled strict 2+ standards covering monitoring, configuration, UX, high availability, etc., by forming a cross‑team project group, leveraging external consulting, and aligning the assessment with our internal technology‑operations roadmap.

Q: Future plans? We aim to propagate the successful practices from this project to other systems, strengthen cloud infrastructure, information security, and operational innovation, and contribute industry‑wide best practices.

DevOps Maturity Model Overview

The “Research‑Development‑Operations Integration (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model” was jointly created by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, cloud‑computing alliances, and leading internet and financial enterprises. It includes agile management, continuous delivery, technical operations, application design, security & risk management, and tool ecosystems. Since 2021, the model adds “+” levels (1+, 2+, 3+, 4+) for finer granularity.

The model has been adopted by many financial, telecom, and internet companies, with Huatai Securities being the first securities firm to achieve the 2+ level.