You’re Salesforce. Aren’t you just a sales company?

We hear this a lot from engineers in the industry. Can’t blame ’em. We are called Salesforce. But, while we do build products and provide services that support sales teams, we’re not “just a sales company”. We’re a massive distributed systems engineering company–an API and mobile-first, cloud computing platform–that builds for sales, service, marketing, communities, analytics, apps, and now, the internet of things. The truth is, we’re probably much broader than you think.

We have tens of millions of users, across many industries, with differing needs. Our platform is deeply customizable to meet the vast demands of our userbase. We process well over 3 billion transactions a day at 200 milliseconds on average. We have hundreds of Agile engineering teams that ship hundreds of features to production (some teams daily), with near-zero downtime. We ensure the highest quality by continuously running 300k+ feature and performance tests, and supporting our services is a 24×7 global Site Reliability engineering team.

Bottom line is our customers trust us with the success of their business, and there is no room for failure. Our users expect us to be highly available, lightning fast, supremely secure, and to preserve all of their customizations and integrations every time we ship, without breaking anything. This all creates complex and unique challenges for our engineering teams every single day.

This collection of stories isn’t about how great our products are and why you should use them. This is not where we want to sell you anything. This collection of stories is all about technology and engineering. We want to transparently share what’s happening behind the cloud and the puzzles we’ve had to solve along the way. You’ll hear from engineers across Salesforce including our Heroku, SalesforceIQ (formerly RelateIQ), Pardot and Tempo engineering teams, for example. We welcome you to join the conversation and hope to learn from you as well.