How Liaoning Mobile Revamped Its DevOps System for Agile, Cloud‑Native Success

Accelerating Digital Transformation

In line with China’s "14th Five‑Year Plan" emphasis on digital‑intelligent transformation, Liaoning Mobile leveraged the "Smart Middle Platform" strategy to launch 115 business scenarios across six domains, empowering front‑line operations and supporting high‑quality development.

Four Pillars of the New DevOps Capability

1. Talent and Team Building

A talent‑management system was established to guide existing staff toward future roles, fostering a "four‑understanding" team that excels in technology, demand, customer, and market awareness, and embodying values of professional innovation, collaborative responsibility, and dedication.

2. Continuous Delivery Tools

A unified DevOps platform was built to shorten the time from idea to delivery, featuring an electronic dashboard that provides end‑to‑end data visibility, eliminates bottlenecks, and aligns IT delivery pace with business growth.

3. Cloud‑Native Architecture

A container‑based cloud platform was created to offer a unified cloud‑native foundation, supporting elastic resource scheduling, a consistent service‑governance framework, and gray‑release mechanisms that enable controlled upgrades without database changes.

4. Intelligent Operations System

By enhancing container and micro‑service management in complex cloud‑native environments, the team strengthened end‑to‑end fault governance, accelerated AIOps adoption, and automated operations such as self‑healing and unattended service monitoring, ensuring continuous availability and security.

Key DevOps Platform Components

The integrated platform includes a unified portal, continuous delivery pipelines, an automated testing platform, and a metrics dashboard. The portal offers a one‑stop entry for project managers, developers, and testers. Pipelines link requirement development, quality assurance, and production deployment. The testing platform provides a shared repository of automated test cases and results, while the metrics dashboard visualizes multi‑dimensional indicators across the development lifecycle.

Challenges and Solutions

Three major challenges were addressed:

Evolving DevOps Practices: Liaoning Mobile joined industry‑wide DevOps empowerment programs and achieved a leading maturity level through external certifications and knowledge exchange.

Tool and Process Adoption: Transitioning from ANT to Maven, SVN to Git, and introducing Nexus, Sonar, and pipeline‑driven builds required extensive training and a phased pilot‑to‑scale approach.

Conflict with Traditional IT Governance: To reconcile DevOps’s single‑source‑of‑truth principle with existing environment isolation, the team migrated deployments from virtual machines to containers, using image‑based releases to separate code from environment.

Outcomes and Future Plans

The project delivered higher development efficiency, faster business‑centric releases, and improved internal and external customer satisfaction. Liaoning Mobile plans to replicate the DevOps model across its CRM domain, enhance platform extensibility, explore large‑scale agile collaboration, and adopt infrastructure‑as‑code practices.

Industry Perspective

In the era of 5G, cloud computing, big data, AI, and IoT, DevOps has become a cornerstone of digital‑intelligent transformation, driving both engineering and organizational agility.