How South Grid’s Cloud Yan Platform Secured Top DevOps Maturity Scores

Large enterprises worldwide have demonstrated that standardization and tool empowerment are crucial for success. The DevOps standards and a standards‑based continuous delivery pipeline can markedly improve quality, efficiency, safety, and agility, boosting market competitiveness.

On April 7, 2023, the 20th GOPS Global Operations Conference was held in Shenzhen, jointly organized by GreatOPS and the Open Operations Alliance (OOPSA). The event, the largest operations conference in China, targeted operations and development professionals from internet, finance, telecom and other traditional industries.

At the conference, the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) announced the latest batch of DevOps capability maturity assessment results. South Grid’s Digital Platform Technology (Guangdong) Co., Ltd. participated with the “Cloud Yan Platform DevOps Subsystem” and achieved Excellent‑level evaluations for the “Build and Continuous Integration” and “Pipeline” modules, indicating a domestic leading position.

South Grid has so far passed three DevOps system and tool standard assessments.

Q: Please introduce your company and the project evaluated.

A: Digital Platform Technology Co., Ltd. is a wholly‑owned subsidiary of South Grid Digital Power Group, focusing on digital infrastructure platforms, asset digitization, and intelligent development. The Cloud Yan platform DevOps subsystem provides collaborative development, code repository, scanning, packaging, automated deployment and testing, enabling continuous build, integration, release and testing while meeting uniform code‑quality standards.

Q: How important is an end‑to‑end, integrated toolchain for DevOps implementation?

A: The subsystem links requirement, design, development, testing, deployment and operation, achieving continuous build, integration, release and testing, ensuring a streamlined, standardized, and integrated workflow that improves software delivery quality.

Q: What considerations drove your participation in the system and tool standard assessment?

A: The assessment helps evaluate the current DevOps implementation, identify gaps, and guide continuous improvement, thereby enhancing software engineering capability and supporting South Grid’s digital transformation.

Q: What changes resulted from passing the assessment?

A: The team adopted industry standards, conducted internal pilots, and embedded core practices into the platform, creating a stable, fast, high‑quality delivery pipeline.

Q: What improvements were observed after the assessment?

A: Build success rate increased by 27%, deployment success rate by 33%, average build time decreased by 37%, and overall pipeline execution time reduced by 34%.

Q: What challenges were faced during the assessment and how were they solved?

A: High collaboration and communication costs were mitigated by forming cross‑departmental teams, reaching consensus on standards, and referencing industry best practices.

Q: What are the next steps for DevOps development?

A: Establish a DevOps talent cultivation system, train internal coaches, and continuously align with the maturity model to drive further improvement.

Q: What is your view on the future direction of DevOps?

A: With broader adoption, DevOps will evolve toward diversification, emphasizing security, risk management, and intelligent operations, guided by industry standards.

Other industries also participated in the DevOps capability maturity assessments, with statistics up to April 7, 2023, showing the number of projects evaluated across sectors.

The “Research and Development Operations Integration (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model” series standards, led by CAICT together with cloud‑computing alliances, top internet companies, and major finance and telecom enterprises, constitute the first domestic and international DevOps standards, recognized by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and adopted by many leading firms.

The model covers agile development management, continuous delivery, technical operation, security and risk management, system and tool, business value management, collaborative development and operations, and continuous testing.

For inquiries about DevOps standard assessments, contact CAICT (Liu Kailiang, phone 15650786171, email [email protected]) or GreatOPS (Wei Huanxin, phone 18500255645, email [email protected]).