As digital transformation rapidly advances, China Guangfa Bank (CGB) is deeply implementing its innovation-driven development strategy to build a highly efficient and intelligent Industry Cloud Operations system.
This article introduces how CGB constructed this system through technological innovation and management optimization, showcasing the achievements of the CGB Industry Cloud in Operations-Business Integration and Technical Architecture Platformization. These achievements include a number of cutting-edge practices such as Object Digitalization, Status Digitalization, Service Behavior Digitalization, Operations Automation, and Operations Digitalization.
The 20th National Congress report proposed accelerating the development of the digital economy and promoting the deep integration of the digital economy and the real economy.The People’s Bank of China’s "FinTech Development Plan (2022-2025)" proposes strengthening the financial technology governance system, improving digital infrastructure, and further promoting the deep integration and sustainable development of finance and technology.
CGB is deeply implementing its innovation-driven development strategy, focusing on "transforming into a digital enterprise, building a digital ecosystem, and integrating into the digital world," to create the "China Guangfa Bank Industry Cloud" to empower various industry clients to integrate into the new development paradigm.The CGB Industry Cloud is a proprietary cloud platform that hosts CGB's industry-enabling digital products and ecosystem partnership applications, currently hosting digital products like "Digital Enterprise Connectivity" "Digital Labor Union" "Digital Bankruptcy", and "Digital Kindergarten" It provides precise financial services, professional industry services, and convenient technical and data services to industry clients.The rapid growth of innovative industry businesses presents new challenges for IT Operations.
External Environment:
As IT technology changes and digital transformation rapidly advances, the number and scale of application systems have increased significantly. Traditional IT operations methods, often structured around projects or IT technology stacks, cannot keep pace with rapidly evolving business requirements. Moreover, linearly growing operations costs are unsustainable in complex cloud environments and application interaction scenarios, driving IT Operations towards professional, standardized, and centralized management.The finance and banking industry, as a risk-averse sector, demands extremely high business timeliness and stability.
As a leading industry in the national digital strategy, it has seen frequent policy introductions and high regulatory attention on digital business in recent years.Furthermore, the rapid development and changes in IT technical architecture—including the maturity of technologies such as DevOps (Development and Operations Integration), Agile Delivery, Unified Operations, and AIOps (Intelligent Operations)—have pointed the direction for the future of Industry Cloud Operations.
Internal Strategy:
To diligently implement CGB's Dual Cloud-Driven Strategy (Financial Cloud and Industry Cloud), the bank aimed to enhance the integrated operations management level of the Industry Cloud. The goal was to build the CGB Industry Cloud Unified Operations Monitoring Management Platform, which integrates "Unified Operations Monitoring + Centralized Configuration Management + Online Service Processes + Job Automation + Unified Monitoring Dashboard". This includes constructing a foundational technical support platform based on general operations service capabilities and scenarios, which the Industry Cloud will leverage to quickly set up various operations scenarios and enhance overall operations capabilities.
Technical Demand:
The maturity of technologies such as Automated Operations, Integrated Operations, Platform-plus-Scenario Operations, Data-driven Operations, and Intelligent Operations can bring a significant leap in the quality and level of operations. To meet the demands of financial informatization development, there is an urgent need for operations service support systems to advance towards automation and intelligence.
01. Operations-Business Integration and Technical Architecture Platformization
The Industry Cloud operations are guided by the bank's overall operations planning direction, focusing on the needs of operations business and the current status of the Industry Cloud across IT object data modeling, object status, object operations, and management processes.
By building an integrated operations technology platform, the bank achieved unified control over Industry Cloud applications, data, and cloud running status.
This involved two main efforts: first, constructing an Intelligent Alert Center and Monitoring Center to strengthen fault discovery and handling capabilities, thus improving system stability.
Second, developing the IT Service Center and Operations Automation Center to enhance IT service process flow and automation, which shields against change risks, limits operations staff permissions, and simultaneously boosts efficiency, quickly responding to business needs and improving the operations service experience. The overall technical architecture of the operations platform uses a PaaS platform as the foundation for integrated operations, centralizing the management of heterogeneous IT objects. It abstracts common capabilities—such as user management, permission management, configuration management, job execution, API management, and low-code development—into a unified platform capability layer, using a unified Agent to establish communication with the resource control layer. For specific monitoring, governance, and control scenarios, the platform's runtime hosting and development environment management capabilities are leveraged to maximize the reuse of mid-layer PaaS capabilities, reducing development costs, moving away from a "stovepipe" architecture (siloed systems), and ensuring business stability.
02. Achievements: Technical Platformization Driving Operations Digitalization
Following the industry's path for operations digitalization, the Industry Cloud operations monitoring platform has built its development roadmap around three main stages: Object Digitalization, Behavior Digitalization, and Operations Digitalization.
1) Object Digitalization: Application-Centric CMDB Building an IT Digital Mirror
As the data foundation for IT Operations, an accurate, stable, and capable Configuration Management Database (CMDB) is vital for enterprise operations management.However, past CMDBs often focused on IT resource objects, lacking sufficient support for current microservice and distributed applications.
This is addressed through the operations platform's capabilities for configuration collection, model management, data interface integration, and application topology visualization. The operations team reconstructed the configuration management system to be application-centric and consumption-scenario driven.
This process involved redesigning and developing 10 categories, "160+" models, and "20+" consumption scenarios.Leveraging the configuration management platform's features like configuration auditing, attribute verification, and visualized reports, the team ensures data operation and verification.
This approach achieved two goals: first, making configuration data objective, trustworthy, and consumable; and second, establishing the configuration platform as the data foundation for Operations Automation, Status Monitoring, and Process Management, truly realizing the enterprise's IT Digital Mirror.
2) Status Digitalization: Closed-Loop Alert Lifecycle Management
Leveraging the platform's probe plugin integration capabilities, data collection integrates heterogeneous monitoring tool probes as plugins onto the platform Agent.
This simultaneously reduces performance overhead and lowers management costs, as all plugin running statuses can be viewed by logging into a single platform.For monitoring data presentation, an open API is used to unify monitoring data from various monitoring tools, pushed via API integration to the monitoring platform for centralized viewing and unified alerting.
Because the platform uses a unified CMDB, which standardizes data sources and objects, it can simultaneously handle object and process monitoring by combining instance objects and process information from the CMDB.The platform's collector extensions also provide a better solution for compatibility with heterogeneous object monitoring. Alert management uses an Integrated Alert Center to close the loop on the entire alert lifecycle, covering discovery, generation, response, location, resolution, review, and overall improvement.
Pre-Event: The platform consolidates and aggregates heterogeneous alert sources (Cloud Platform, Zabbix, security products) that originally existed in the Industry Cloud into the Alert Center. This standardizes the generation of alert events and achieves "unification" of heterogeneous alert events and "centralization" of alert information.
In-Event: After an alert is generated, the Alert Center uses technical means like full alert information format unification, event cleansing, deduplication, and filtering to transform the alerts from "quantity" to "quality". This process shields against interference from repetitive and false alerts. The refined alert information, supplemented with object data obtained from the CMDB, is accurately pushed to operations personnel.By integrating the Alert Center with the IT Service Center, confirmed alerts automatically generate Service Tickets for centralized incident management in the IT Service Management Center.
Post-Event: At the post-event handling level, in addition to linking with the IT Service Management Center for ticket generation and flow, the Alert Center integrates the operations platform's Automated Operations module. By pre-setting automated solutions for known and common faults, the platform achieves self-healing operations for those faults.
3) Service Behavior Digitalization: Abstracting Operations Services to Enhance "Consumption" Experience
The Industry Cloud had previously established a large number of operations management processes and standards across multiple operations business domains, including cloud operations, infrastructure, and application management.
However, the lack of professional operations processes and IT Service Management (ITSM) tools resulted in challenges such as difficult process execution and low collaboration efficiency.The integrated operations platform implementation included the construction of an IT Service Management Center, leveraging capabilities like the process engine, service catalog, SLA management, and operations automation integration. This moved the operations management process from "offline" to "online".
Furthermore, by integrating SLA management and linking automated operations execution, the platform improved process efficiency while ensuring compliance.For the service experience, an Industry Cloud IT Service Portal was designed and built. Business and R&D personnel only need to submit a service request, and the process ticket is digitally routed through approval, operation, and execution across relevant teams, providing a one-stop service.A Service Level Agreement (SLA) engine is preset within the workflow to perform data-driven analysis of process timeliness and visualize flow efficiency.
4) Operations Automation: Centralized Management of Operations Actions and Effective Control of Operational Risk
An Automated Operations Center was built to centrally manage scripts and automation tools scattered among operations personnel, achieving unified management, issuance, and authorization of automation scripts.
A visualized automation orchestration platform was set up to lower the requirements for operations personnel and standardize script management and scenarios through built-in periodic task and automation task management capabilities.
By integrating asset data from the IT Configuration Management Center, the data link was established. This improved the selection of automated job targets, enhanced execution accuracy, and reduced the possibility of operations risks caused by manual processes.
Previously, using open-source automation tools resulted in a disconnect and poor correlation between the management flow and the operations flow.
After the operations platform was established, its built-in API gateway was used to sequence automated operations as a node within the overall operations process in the IT Service Center. This connected the Management Flow with the Execution Flow, achieving a business closed loop where operations actions have a basis and task results have evidence.
5) Operations Digitalization: Application Asset Visualization, One Screen for the Big Picture
A Visualized Digital Operations Center was created to build operations data dashboards. A visualization dashboard designer allows for custom integration of key operations metrics such as application configuration data, monitoring alert data, and process data.
Administrators can customize the dashboard style and connect back-end data for visualization and dynamic display using various formats like pie charts, bar charts, line graphs, and histograms.
This single screen dynamically presents key information such as Industry Cloud load status, critical alerts, and application topology, allowing operations staff to intuitively grasp application status and asset capacity by viewing data, reports, and topology changes.
03. Future Outlook: Every Step Counts
As of October 2024, the Industry Cloud Integrated Operations Platform has completed monitoring coverage for all cloud applications, centralized control of cloud resources, and automated operations execution.
The initial project goals of manageable processes, controllable operations, and visible status have been achieved.
In the future, the bank will continue to leverage the platform's value for deeper construction. This includes: first, integrating operations data and using online and offline computing technologies for data modeling, development, and model training to expand Intelligent Operations (AIOps) business scenarios, moving from automation to intelligence;and second, deepening the construction of operations business scenarios unique to the Industry Cloud, utilizing the platform's Ops Development capabilities to build applications for intelligent decision-making, Root CauseAnalysis (RCA), and alert knowledge recommendation.
