At Salesforce, many workloads run on Hyperforce, Salesforce's public cloud platform, which hosts containerized apps on Kubernetes with dependencies like blob stores and databases. Replicating these locally is often impractical, forcing developers to wait for full deployments.

Salesforce's outer-loop CI/CD cycle takes 20-60 minutes per push. To iterate faster developers use an inner-loop workflow:
• Building and pushing a container image from their workstation to a remote repository.
• Patching the respective K8s workload with the new image.

This reduces feedback loop time by 77%. A CLI-driven approach abstracts cross-cutting concerns like authentication, cluster config, and workload identification, streamlining the experience.

To prevent conflicts between developers working on the same app, we introduced ephemeral environments—lightweight, isolated clones within the same cluster. Using service mesh for deterministic routing, these enable efficient, cost-effective development.