Jinzhou Bank’s 3‑Level DevOps Success: How They Reached Leading Maturity

Background

Large enterprises worldwide have demonstrated that standardization and tool empowerment are key to success. The DevOps standards and the DevOps continuous delivery pipeline platform significantly improve quality and efficiency, enhancing market competitiveness.

The China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) released the "R&D Operations Integration (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model" series standards, which guide enterprises in implementing DevOps. Companies from banking, securities, insurance, telecom, and internet sectors have participated in CAICT assessments, improving their IT capabilities.

On December 15, 2023, the 2023 GOLF+ IT New Governance Leadership Forum was held in Beijing, where CAICT announced the latest DevOps and AIOps assessment results.

Jinzhou Bank Case

Jinzhou Bank’s "Mobile Banking Investment Service Micro‑service Transformation Project" passed the CAICT Level‑3 Continuous Delivery assessment, indicating a domestic leading level of capability.

The bank’s mobile banking app, built on mobile internet, 5G, big data, facial recognition, and intelligent voice technologies, offers transfer, investment, online loans, bill payment, and credit card management services across standard, senior, and enterprise versions.

Interview Highlights

Q: Please introduce your company and the project.

A: Jinzhou Bank, founded in 1997, operates 15 branches and a small‑enterprise financial service center, employing over 6,000 staff. The mobile banking app serves as a key online channel, and the micro‑service transformation project is the cornerstone for its next development phase.

Q: How does achieving the Level‑3 assessment feel?

A: It validates the bank’s DevOps promotion, marking industry‑leading DevOps capability and greatly enhancing R&D efficiency.

Q: Why did you decide to join the DevOps assessment?

A: Since 2021, the bank has implemented agile transformation and DevOps construction, using toolchains and engineering methods to improve delivery capability. The assessment aligns with the bank’s digital transformation roadmap.

Q: What improvements did the assessment bring?

A: The R&D team’s efficiency improved, platform functions were optimized, and the bank plans to internalize and scale the capabilities, establishing robust engineering standards.

Q: What metrics illustrate the project’s impact?

A: End‑to‑end continuous delivery now enables weekly releases instead of monthly; a full business value delivery can be completed within 7 days, reducing cycle time from two months to two weeks, with 100% production deployment success over three months.

Q: What are the key technical features of the mobile banking system?

A: The system uses a dual‑active city‑level high‑availability architecture, supports rate limiting and circuit breaking, and adopts a distributed micro‑service architecture with technologies such as Nacos, SkyWalking, ELK, and Redis.

Q: What challenges were faced during the assessment?

A: Over a hundred optimization points were identified, ranging from organization‑level versioning rules to detailed code review practices, leading to iterative improvements that narrowed the gap to best practices.

Q: What are the future plans?

A: The bank aims to further empower tools, scale the DevOps pipeline, and enhance tool robustness and usability to support broader digital transformation.

Industry Participation

Statistics up to December 15, 2023 show numerous city‑commercial banks and financial institutions have participated in the DevOps capability maturity model assessments, with data visualized in the original report.

About the DevOps Capability Maturity Model

The model, led by CAICT with contributions from leading internet companies and industry groups, is the first comprehensive DevOps standard in China and has been adopted by many enterprises. It was also concluded by the ITU‑T in July 2020 as the world’s first international DevOps standard.

The model covers agile development management, continuous delivery, technical operations, DevSecOps, system and tool management, business value management, collaborative development and operations, continuous testing, performance measurement, platform engineering, and SRE.