How Leading Chinese Insurers Achieved DevOps Maturity: Case Studies and Insights

Background

Amid digital transformation, enterprises adopt DevOps to boost efficiency. The "R&D‑Operations Integrated (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model" series, led by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), provides strong guidance for evaluating and improving IT capabilities across industries.

Insurance Companies Assessed

Three insurance enterprises have completed DevOps capability maturity assessments:

China People's Insurance (PICC)

China Life Property Insurance

Taikang Insurance

Continuous Delivery (Standard 3) Compliance

China People's Insurance Distributed Core System Project

The project integrates cloud, distributed, and micro‑service technologies, featuring a three‑tier architecture (front‑end, middle‑end, back‑end) that enables modular system construction and rapid adaptation to business model changes. It rebuilds underwriting, claims, sales, and service processes to enhance user experience.

Technically, it relies on the proprietary PDF‑C distributed micro‑service framework and advanced database technologies to ensure high concurrency performance and stability.

Infrastructure uses a private‑cloud model with containers, providing elastic scaling, rapid resource provisioning, and multi‑active, multi‑center operation that supports 2,000 km of remote intelligent traffic diversion, ensuring business continuity.

Taikang Insurance “Taikang Mall” System

The "Taikang Mall" platform evolved from a legacy system, addressing scalability, maintainability, and stability issues. Rapid business growth rendered the old system incapable of meeting new requirements, prompting a comprehensive technical and process overhaul.

The team adopted a phased stripping and replacement strategy, using business needs as drivers to incrementally replace legacy components while maintaining compatibility, a process likened to changing a car’s tires and engine while driving.

China Life Property Insurance Agricultural Claims System

This next‑generation core system supports full‑process agricultural insurance claims, offering rich functionality, advanced technology, and user‑friendly interfaces. It automates reporting, dispatch, case handling, calculation, settlement, and reopening, achieving intelligent, automated, and fine‑grained claim management.

Through a Level‑3 DevOps continuous delivery assessment, the project achieved significant improvements in demand, development, testing, and deployment capabilities, delivering high‑quality, rapid releases. Unit test pass rate reached 100%, automated interface test coverage 100%, average build time under 15 minutes, and build success rate above 90%.

Source Links

PICC Distributed Core System DevOps Level‑3 Assessment

Taikang Insurance Taikang Mall DevOps Level‑3 Assessment

China Life Agricultural Claims System DevOps Level‑3 Assessment

DevOps Capability Maturity Model Overview

The DevOps Capability Maturity Model series, jointly developed by CAICT, the Cloud Computing Open Source Industry Alliance, the Efficient Operations Community, BATJ, and major financial and telecom enterprises, is the first domestic and international DevOps standard series. It has been approved by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU‑T) in July 2020, becoming the world’s first international DevOps standard.

The assessment framework covers agile development management, continuous delivery, technical operations, application design, security and risk management, systems and tools.

Contact for DevOps Standard Evaluation

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

Efficient Operations Community – Dong Hui (WeChat: 185 1511 5139, Email: [email protected])