The 15-Minute Performance Test
The pull request was small, a single-line change to a data processing job. Yet the CI pipeline had just spun up a complete, isolated, production-scale environment, loaded it with terabytes of realistic data, and was now running a full performance benchmark. Fifteen minutes later, it posted a comment with the results: latency down by 5%, CPU usage unchanged, and, most importantly, the estimated monthly cost of the change was a rounding error. The environment then vanished as if it had never existed. This automated, ephemeral world was new for us, and it was already changing everything.