How Suzhou Bank Achieved Leading DevOps Standards: Dual ITU & Domestic Certification

On May 29, 2024, China’s central cyberspace administration, market regulation authority, and Ministry of Industry and Information Technology jointly issued the "Information Standard Construction Action Plan (2024‑2027)" to promote the internationalization of information standards, encouraging deep participation in ISO, IEC, ITU and other international bodies and fostering alignment between national and international standards.

China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) launched a synchronized assessment based on the ITU DevOps international standard and the domestic DevOps standard, enabling mutual recognition of certifications. This assessment upgrades the scope, certificates, and reports of the DevOps international standard, directly supporting the national action plan.

On June 28, 2024, at the 23rd GOPS Global Operations Conference and XOps Technology Innovation Summit in Beijing, CAICT announced the dual‑certificate results for Suzhou Bank’s "Mobile Banking 5.0" back‑office system.

Project Overview

Suzhou Bank, a listed city‑commercial bank headquartered in Suzhou, presented its Mobile Banking 5.0 project, which builds a unified internet business middle‑platform based on distributed micro‑services. The platform integrates mobile banking, personal online banking, unified user management, transaction processing, risk control, and product management, and incorporates voice‑semantic recognition, biometric authentication, anti‑fraud, FIDO identity verification, and SMS security hardening.

Key Interview Highlights

Feelings on passing the assessments: The team expressed great satisfaction, noting that the certification validates years of DevOps practice, improves digital transformation, and drives organizational, process, collaboration, measurement, and management reforms.

Why join the ITU DevOps assessment? Since 2016, Suzhou Bank has pursued tool‑driven DevOps, standardizing build and deployment, and later built a comprehensive automation toolchain. In early 2023, the bank launched a DevOps platform guided by CAICT’s Level‑3 continuous delivery standard, using Mobile Banking 5.0 as a pilot.

Impact of the assessment: The integrated DevOps platform enables end‑to‑end digital management of requirements, development, integration, testing, and delivery, solving common pain points such as low code management efficiency, version conflicts, and manual errors, while establishing a quantitative‑analysis‑improvement loop.

Quantitative improvements:

Technical highlights of Mobile Banking 5.0: Launched in September 2020, the system follows a "customer‑centric, app‑centric, journey‑centric, scenario‑centric" philosophy, delivering a "green, healthy, personalized, exclusive, secure" mobile banking experience. It employs distributed databases, file systems, and caches to achieve a scalable, high‑availability architecture capable of handling 6000 QPS.

Challenges during assessment: The agile project generated over 140 improvement items, with 10‑20 tasks per iteration, and required alignment of understanding across teams. Management responded with multiple DevOps training sessions and iterative task breakdown, ensuring quality delivery.

Future Plans

The bank will use the pilot as a benchmark to refine code, integration, release, testing, and measurement standards across the organization, enhance metric models, and visualize software processes to drive continuous improvement.

DevOps Standards Overview

The ITU‑DevOps international standard (ITU‑T Y.3525) was approved in 2018, with participation from over 90 representatives from more than 20 countries. The domestic standard, "Research and Development Operations Integration (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model," was authored by CAICT together with leading internet, finance, and telecom enterprises, and has been adopted by many organizations.

Both standards cover agile development management, continuous delivery, technical operations, application design, security, system and tool management, value management, collaborative development, continuous testing, performance measurement, platform engineering, and reliability engineering.

For further information on DevOps standard assessments, contact CAICT representatives (emails: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]) or the Efficient Operations Community (Wei Huanxin, [email protected]).