Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

There’s a moment every cloud team eventually faces. Dashboards look green. CPU is stable. Memory isn’t spiking. Auto-scaling is configured. And yet, users say the system feels slow. Welcome to cloud-native performance engineering. After working across environments hosted on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, I’ve realised something important: Cloud doesn’t eliminate performance problems. It simply changes their shape.

In the traditional banking world, “Quality” was defined by the perimeter. If the core banking system was stable and the customer portal didn’t crash, QA had done its job. We operated in a world of controlled environments. We owned the code, the server and the user experience. Then came Open Banking. Suddenly, the perimeter has vanished. Today, a bank’s value is determined by how well it communicates with external fintechs, payment aggregators and retail ecosystems.

I built AI Agents to handle my test automation, and they immediately tried to unionise. I’ve been doing test automation for long enough that I can spot a flaky test from far away, with the sixth sense of a person who has been personally betrayed by “WaitForTimeout(5000)” more times than they’ll admit in polite company.

The world of Salesforce is changing fast and so is the job of Quality Assurance (QA). It used to be that QA was just the team that checked if a new feature worked correctly right before it went live. Think of them as the final proofreaders. But with powerful new tools like Agentforce (Salesforce’s smart agent system) and a huge focus on Data 360 (getting all your data in one trusted place), QA has become something much more important: the main way your company avoids major problems.