Inside Jiangsu Telecom’s Leap to Level‑3 DevOps Continuous Delivery

Editor's note: According to a McKinsey study, success for technology companies depends on two factors: standardization and tool empowerment. Standards gather best practices; embedding them in tools helps teams focus on higher‑value work and aligns with DevOps principles.

On December 26, 2019, the Operations Conference was held in Beijing. It was organized by the China Information Communication Research Institute, the China Communications Standardization Association, the TC608 Cloud Computing Standards Committee, and supported by the Cloud Computing Open Source Industry Alliance. The event aimed to promote industry development, accelerate the adoption of new operational technologies, and facilitate experience sharing among experts.

The conference announced the sixth batch of DevOps standard continuous‑delivery assessment results. Jiangsu Telecom Operations Maintenance Center, China Telecom Group Digital Application Capability Center, and Jiangsu Telecom Software Research Institute jointly advanced the Intelligent Pre‑Processing System to pass the Level‑3 continuous‑delivery assessment, receiving the "Research and Development Operations Integration (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model" certificate from the China Information Communication Research Institute. Level 3 is considered a domestic leading level, making Jiangsu Telecom the first provincial unit of China Telecom Group to achieve this milestone.

-Q&A-

Q: Please introduce yourself, your company, and the project you evaluated.

A: Jiangsu Telecom Operations Maintenance Center is a direct center of Jiangsu Telecom, responsible for province‑wide metro, core, transmission, and cloud platform maintenance and 24/7 centralized monitoring. The Intelligent Pre‑Processing System is an application platform for automatic fault location, diagnosis, and proactive handling suggestions.

Q: How do you feel after passing the Level‑3 DevOps continuous‑delivery assessment?

A: We are delighted to achieve Level 3. The Intelligent Pre‑Processing System is Jiangsu Telecom’s first evaluated project, marking a successful start. The assessment has significantly improved our continuous‑delivery capability, reinforced DevOps practices within the team, and provided valuable experience for other projects.

Q: How was the project selected for the DevOps standard assessment?

A: Telecom operators are shifting toward customer‑centric, high‑quality development. Rapid fault location and resolution are critical, making the Intelligent Pre‑Processing System essential. Complex and diverse customer fault reports demand fast requirement turnover, so enhancing the project’s DevOps capability was crucial.

Q: What does the assessment mean for the project team?

A: It validates our continuous‑delivery capability at a high level and highlights the gap to Level 4, providing clear direction for future improvements.

Q: How does the DevOps standard help your enterprise?

A: The standard offers systematic guidance for implementing DevOps best practices, allowing enterprises to benchmark their DevOps maturity, identify gaps, and drive continuous improvement.

Q: What are the key features of the Intelligent Pre‑Processing System?

A: As a service platform, it integrates underlying network operation capabilities and data, orchestrates them uniformly, and outputs fault segments and diagnostic reports according to business rules for upper‑layer applications.

Q: Was the assessment process smooth? What challenges did you face and how were they solved?

A: The project was the first DevOps pilot within China Telecom, facing a lack of experience and large changes while maintaining regular feature releases. By jointly developing project and platform capabilities and applying rapid‑iteration DevOps practices, we overcame these challenges and greatly improved development efficiency.

Q: What are the next steps for the team?

A: Leadership emphasizes DevOps promotion. We plan to enable a batch of projects to adopt DevOps, focusing on (1) personnel empowerment – sharing lessons learned to upskill other teams, and (2) system adjustment – designing new systems according to DevOps standards and continuously optimizing existing architectures.

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

A: DevOps is essential for meeting rapidly changing user demands and improving development efficiency. Continuous, efficient delivery of new features to production will become a basic requirement, helping technology enterprises excel in cloud computing, IoT, big data, video, and enhancing China Telecom’s DICT capability.

The world’s first DevOps standard, the "Research and Development Operations Integration (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model," was led by the China Information Communication Research Institute together with experts from the Cloud Computing Open Source Industry Alliance, Efficient Operations Community, DevOps Era Community, Google, BATJ, Tsinghua University, Nanjing University, and leading enterprises in communications and finance. The standard has been officially listed by ITU‑T and the China Communications Standardization Association (CCSA).

Previously, enterprises that passed the CAICT DevOps continuous‑delivery maturity assessment include Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, Bank of China, Huatai Securities, Zhejiang Mobile, Tencent, China Merchants Bank, Guangdong Mobile, Beijing Mobile, Qunar, Zhengzhou Bank, and others.