How Jinzhou Bank Reached Domestic Leading Level 3 DevOps Continuous Delivery

Standardization and tool empowerment are key to enterprise success, and DevOps standards with a continuous delivery pipeline can significantly improve quality, efficiency, and market competitiveness.

The China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) has issued a "Research and Development Operations Integration (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model" that guides enterprises in implementing DevOps practices; banks, securities, insurance, telecom, and internet companies have actively participated in assessments.

On December 15, 2023, the 2023 GOLF+ IT New Governance Leadership Forum in Beijing announced the latest DevOps and AIOps standard assessment results.

Jinzhou Bank’s "Mobile Banking Investment Service Microservice Transformation" project successfully passed the CAICT Level 3 Continuous Delivery assessment, indicating the bank’s capabilities are among the domestic leaders.

Interview

Q: Please introduce yourself, your company, and the project you evaluated.

A (Feng Xue): I am the Assistant General Manager of Jinzhou Bank’s FinTech Department. Jinzhou Bank, founded in 1997, operates 15 branches and a small‑enterprise service center, employing over 6,000 staff. Our mobile banking app, built on 5G, big data, facial recognition, and voice AI, offers transfer, investment, loan, payment, and credit‑card services across standard, senior, and enterprise versions.

Q: How did you feel about achieving Level 3 Continuous Delivery?

A: We are thrilled; the assessment validates our DevOps rollout, marking our capabilities as industry‑leading and laying a strong foundation for further digital transformation.

Q: Why did you decide to join the DevOps standard assessment?

A: Since 2021 we have pursued agile transformation and DevOps construction, solidifying agile methods and tools to boost efficiency. The assessment aligns with our digital transformation roadmap, using international standards to accelerate progress.

Q: What benefits has the DevOps assessment brought to your organization?

A: Our engineering efficiency improved, platform functions were optimized, and we are now preparing to internalize and scale these capabilities, establishing robust engineering standards that support rapid, high‑quality delivery across the bank.

Q: Can you share concrete metrics that reflect the project’s improvements?

A (Li Shudong): End‑to‑end continuous delivery now enables weekly releases instead of monthly cycles; a full business value delivery can be completed within seven days, reducing overall delivery time from two months to two weeks, with a 100% production deployment success rate over the past three months.

Q: Describe the technical architecture of the mobile banking system.

A: The system uses a distributed microservice architecture with Nacos, SkyWalking, ELK, Redis, and supports same‑city dual‑active high availability, flexible rate limiting, and circuit breaking.

Q: How smooth was the assessment process, and what challenges did you encounter?

A: The process involved over a hundred optimization points, from organization‑level versioning rules to detailed code reviews, each iteration narrowing the gap to best practices and enhancing our development capabilities.

Q: What is your biggest takeaway from this year’s DevOps implementation, and what are your next steps?

A: The assessment refined our agile delivery pipeline and cultivated talent; next we will further empower tools, scale the DevOps pipeline, and close gaps with higher‑maturity tool standards.

Q: What is your outlook on the future of DevOps?

A: With continuous best‑practice integration, DevOps will become more mature, delivering faster market response, better customer experience, and higher satisfaction.

Images illustrating the assessment and system architecture:

The CAICT DevOps Capability Maturity Model, co‑created with leading internet, finance, and telecom enterprises, is the first comprehensive DevOps series standard globally, recognized by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and adopted by many top firms. It covers agile management, continuous delivery, DevSecOps, system reliability, and performance measurement.