LanZhou Bank’s Journey to Top‑Tier DevOps: Achieving Continuous Delivery Level 3

On May 29, 2024, China’s Central Cyberspace Administration, the State Administration for Market Regulation, and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued the Information Standard Construction Action Plan (2024‑2027) , emphasizing the internationalization of IT standards and the alignment of national standards with ISO, IEC, and ITU standards.

The 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 international and domestic standards. This assessment is a key implementation of the Action Plan.

At the 5th IT New Governance Leadership Forum on December 17, 2024, CAICT announced the dual‑certificate results for the ITU DevOps international standard and the domestic DevOps standard, as well as AIOps and FinOps assessments.

LanZhou Bank participated with its Credit System and successfully passed the ITU DevOps international standard assessment and the domestic Continuous Delivery Level 3 evaluation, demonstrating a leading domestic capability.

Interview Highlights

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

A: LanZhou Bank, founded in 1997, is Gansu’s first local joint‑stock commercial bank with over 4,200 employees and a nationwide branch network. Its credit system, built on micro‑services and distributed architecture, manages the full lifecycle of loan business, enhancing precision, digitization, and risk control.

Q: How does the DevOps assessment benefit your organization?

A: The assessment validated our DevOps platform, accelerated high‑quality delivery, and improved engineering efficiency. It also provided concrete metrics for continuous improvement and supported the bank’s broader digital transformation.

Q: What motivated you to join the DevOps assessment?

A: After years of agile transformation and DevOps platform construction, we used the continuous‑delivery Level 3 standard as a benchmark, selecting the credit system as a pilot to drive organization‑wide DevOps adoption.

Q: What concrete improvements resulted from the assessment?

A: We integrated requirement, development, testing, and operations workflows, optimized platform functions, and established a unified engineering measurement system, leading to shorter delivery cycles, higher release frequency, and better product quality.

Q: Which metrics illustrate the project’s improvement?

A: See the chart below for key performance indicators such as delivery lead time, deployment frequency, and defect density.

The credit system, launched in June 2023, uses a distributed micro‑service architecture with technologies like Nacos and Redis, providing high‑availability processing for massive loan transactions.

The assessment process involved detailed gap analysis, over a hundred concrete improvement actions, and three rounds of optimization, covering organizational policies, version‑number rules, testing strategies, and code‑review practices.

Looking ahead, LanZhou Bank plans to scale the DevOps pipeline to more projects, enrich measurement indicators, and further enhance engineering throughput to fuel its digital transformation.

Future Outlook

DevOps is becoming a cultural and methodological cornerstone of modern software development. With AI, cloud‑native, and container technologies advancing, DevOps tools will become more intelligent and automated, further accelerating digital transformation for enterprises.