How Salesforce Built a Cloud-Native Task Execution Service

How Salesforce Built a Cloud-Native Task Execution Service

摘要

If you’re paying attention to Salesforce technology, you’ve no doubt heard about Hyperforce, our new approach to deploying Salesforce on public cloud providers. Start with a look at Hyperforce’s architecture. There are many compelling reasons to move to Hyperforce, both for us and our customers. We’re excited to do it in the way that only Salesforce would — with trust, availability, and security at the forefront from day one. Building a unified infrastructure platform for Hyperforce meant relooking at our automation tools to scale our operations with a fresh lens.

Salesforce has been around for over two decades. In 1999, when the company was founded, if you wanted to run a public internet software service (Software as a Service, or SaaS), you first had to get some servers and hook them up to the internet. So we built a few tools to perform our releases and database maintenance operations using SSH. Fast forward to 2015, when Salesforce took a very early bet on Kubernetes (K8s) to help manage an extensive suite of microservices. We’re proudly using it today across product lines and business units. And with our transformation to Hyperforce, building and using cloud-native tools, security and process made the most sense.

To leverage the scale and agility of the world’s leading public cloud platforms, our Technology and Products team has worked together over the past few years to build a cloud-native task execution system to execute remote operational tasks at scale. Because we believe you may need to walk down this path, too, we’d like to share some challenges we faced and the solutions we identified.