Platform Engineering: Accelerating Application Delivery and Business Value

Platform engineering is a new technical method aimed at speeding up application delivery and generating business value by offering automated, self‑service infrastructure operations that enhance developer experience and productivity.

It has become a trend because it promises to optimize developer experience and accelerate product teams' delivery of customer value.

"Platform engineering emerged to address the increasing complexity of modern software architectures. Since DevOps teams often originate from support teams, the tools they build primarily serve internal staff, making many operations appear as complex, high‑learning‑cost tools to non‑expert business teams."

In 2017, Tencent senior advisor Qiao Liang highlighted at the Shanghai DevOps conference that DevOps support teams should evolve into platform product‑service teams rather than pure service teams, building operational platforms between end‑users (internal product teams) and the services they rely on to reduce friction.

"DevOps support (service) teams should transform into platform product‑service teams, not pure service teams. Visionary companies should build operational platforms between final users and the supporting services to help and reduce friction with valuable work tasks."

At Tencent's 2021 CI Day, the concept of consistency as a necessary path for R&D efficiency was emphasized, introducing the XaC (Everything as Code) philosophy, which has been implemented across multiple internal efficiency tools.

Gartner predicts that by 2026, 80% of software engineering organizations will establish platform teams that act as internal suppliers of reusable services, components, and tools for application delivery, ultimately solving core collaboration issues between business software development and operations teams.

Platform engineering operates by creating a dedicated product team that builds and maintains a platform offering reusable tools, functions, and API interfaces to support developers, data scientists, product personnel, and managers, tailoring features to user needs and balancing standardization with specialization.

The primary goal is to provide a frictionless, self‑service developer experience with appropriate functionalities that enable developers and others to create valuable software with minimal overhead, improving overall efficiency while reducing cognitive load.

Emerging AI‑driven next‑generation tools further enhance self‑service experiences, making platform engineering a hot topic in the DevOps community and freeing platform teams' productivity.

In summary, platform engineering automates infrastructure operations to deliver reusable tools and smooth self‑service capabilities, improving developer experience and productivity; it leverages reusable, configurable application components and services; and it benefits users through standardized tools, components, and automated processes.

For more details, see Qiao Liang's internal Tencent article "Consistency is the Essential Path to R&D Efficiency" (long read).

Note: The article also includes a promotional notice for a limited‑time discounted video course "Practical Continuous Deployment (NodeJS Edition)" by Qiao Liang.