Inside Jiangsu Mobile’s Journey to Industry-Leading DevOps Maturity

On March 25, 2021, the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) together with the Cloud Computing Open Source Industry Alliance and the Open Operations Alliance hosted the fifth "Enterprise‑level DevOps Empowerment" event, during which Jiangsu Mobile’s Alading marketing empowerment project achieved the third‑level assessment of the DevOps Continuous Delivery Standard, a benchmark recognized as a domestic leading level.

Company and Project Overview

Jiangsu Mobile, a wholly‑owned subsidiary of China Mobile Communications Group, is the largest mobile operator in Jiangsu Province. The Alading project follows a "small front‑end + large middle‑back" architecture, building an integrated marketing platform that enables real‑time, precise, efficient, and collaborative operations, supporting data sharing, capability reuse, rapid response, and business innovation.

Why Join the DevOps Standard Assessment?

Since 2018, Jiangsu Mobile’s IT Center has pursued DevOps transformation to meet the high demands of its 5G‑driven digitalization. Starting with Scrum, the team optimized processes, built automation tools, and adopted the DevOps Capability Maturity Model to benchmark against industry best practices, selecting the Alading project as a measurement‑driven improvement case.

Benefits of Passing the Assessment

The third‑level certification brought three major benefits:

Optimization of the DevOps integration system, covering the full software delivery lifecycle and providing guidance for further transformation.

Evolution of the DevOps toolchain, creating a one‑stop, self‑service platform that lowers development barriers and boosts efficiency and quality.

Talent development, as team members gained extensive DevOps theory and practice experience, strengthening the organization’s agile IT capabilities.

Quantitative Improvements

After the assessment, the team saw notable gains across seven continuous‑delivery sub‑domains: delivery cycle reduced by 45%, pre‑change time cut by 50%, change‑failure rate lowered below 5%, average build time around 5 minutes, automated test coverage reached 100%, and release frequency increased to on‑demand levels.

Project Architecture and Design

The Alading platform embraces a "full, simple, fast, solid" philosophy, using domain‑driven design and a front‑back separation microservice architecture. With a primary user base of frontline marketing staff, the project adopts agile development, dual‑center blue‑green deployment, and cloud‑native practices to support rapid iteration and release.

Challenges Faced During Assessment

Key challenges included high cross‑team collaboration costs, the need for a robust system architecture to support continuous delivery, and the shortage of DevOps experts. The team formed cross‑functional agile squads, containerized and micro‑service‑ized the application, built dedicated CI/CD pipelines for each service, and invested heavily in talent cultivation.

Future Plans and DevOps Outlook

Jiangsu Mobile plans to replicate the Alading project’s success across more complex business‑support systems while maintaining differentiated innovation. The team also aims to enhance the DevOps platform’s extensibility, explore cross‑team agile coordination, and adopt infrastructure‑as‑code practices. Looking ahead, the organization sees DevSecOps becoming an essential evolution of DevOps, integrating security throughout the lifecycle.

About the DevOps Capability Maturity Model

The DevOps Capability Maturity Model, led by CAICT and co‑created with major internet, finance, and telecom enterprises, is the first domestic and international DevOps series standard, officially released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and recognized by the ITU‑T. The standard covers agile development management, continuous delivery, technical operations, application design, security and risk management, and tooling.

For assessment inquiries, contact CAICT (Liu Kailin, 156 5078 6171, [email protected]) or the Efficient Operations Community (Dong Hui, 185 1511 5139, [email protected]).