Inside PICC’s Distributed Core System: Achieving Top‑Tier DevOps Maturity

The GNSEC 2020 Global New‑Generation Software Engineering Online Summit, organized by the Cloud Computing Open Industry Alliance and the DevOps Era Community, announced the seventh batch of DevOps Standard Continuous Delivery assessment results, including China People's Insurance (PICC) among the evaluated enterprises.

PICC’s Distributed Core System project passed the level‑3 Continuous Delivery assessment of the Research and Development Operations Integration (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model conducted by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), a benchmark considered domestically leading.

Certificate No.: IYC-DOCM030055 Assessment Period: May 14‑15, 2020 Assessing Organization: CAICT

Interview with He Dong, Deputy General Manager of PICC’s Software Development Center

Q: Please introduce your company and the evaluated project. A: PICC P&C, a core member of the PICC Group, is a large state‑owned property insurer with global premium rankings. The evaluated project is the Distributed Core System, built on the proprietary “PDF‑C” micro‑service architecture, featuring front‑middle‑back separation, modular construction, AI services (OCR, facial and voice recognition, intelligent客服), and supports massive transaction volumes.

Q: How does achieving a level‑3 rating feel? A: We are delighted; the DevOps platform launched in 2019, backed by senior management, enabled us to meet the assessment goals.

Q: Why did PICC join the DevOps standard assessment? A: In 2018 PICC launched the “3411” digital strategy, emphasizing IT‑Ops integration. We sought industry‑standard guidance and chose the CAICT DevOps maturity model to drive improvement.

Q: What benefits has the assessment brought? A: It refined our DevOps processes, standardized workflows, improved quality through gate controls, and boosted overall delivery efficiency.

Q: What measurable improvements were observed? A: Over 40 distributed teams (200+ micro‑services) now run ~1,500 pipelines with ~100,000 executions. Development cycle dropped from 35 to 7 days, build time from 1 hour to 20 minutes, release frequency increased from 1 to 3‑4 per month, and mean MTTR for critical bugs fell from 7 days to 2 hours.

Q: What are the key architectural features of the project? A: 1) Three‑tier design (front, middle, back) enabling modular system construction. 2) PDF‑C distributed micro‑service framework ensuring high concurrency and stability. 3) Dedicated cloud and container infrastructure providing elastic scaling, multi‑active‑center disaster recovery, and rapid resource provisioning.

Q: Were there challenges during the assessment? A: Yes. The team faced heavy release pressure while transitioning architecture, and strict adherence to standardized processes required extra effort, especially during remote work caused by the pandemic.

Q: What is the biggest takeaway and next steps? A: The DevOps maturity has significantly improved end‑to‑end flow, quality, and automation. PICC plans to further refine practices and establish an internal DevOps maturity evaluation standard.

Q: How do you view the future of DevOps in finance? A: With digital transformation, DevOps will become essential for stable, secure, and rapid delivery. We anticipate broader adoption, continuous evolution of the methodology, and deeper integration with technology operations, security, and mobile applications.

The article also includes diagrams of the DevOps platform, pipelines, artifact repository, and measurement dashboards, illustrating the technical implementation.

For further information on the DevOps standard assessment, contact CAICT (Liu Kaili) or the Efficient Operations Community (Dong Hui).