Salesforce’s Journey to Higher Availability in 2022

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At Salesforce, customer trust is our number one value. To ensure that our customers can continue to trust and rely on the world’s #1 CRM platform, we have innovation as a key tenet at the heart of our product roadmap. However, innovation is not only the purview of fantastic new features and releases. We also strive to innovate at the very foundational core of our platforms and ecosystem to power your business. The resilience and availability of our services are just as critical to our customers as the features and efficiencies these services provide.

With that in mind, we’d like to share our roadmap of exciting new features and ideas that will encompass Salesforce’s journey to Higher Availability for 2022.

The roadmap focuses on seven core themes:

• Monitoring, Alerting and Response
• Network Availability and Resilience
• High Availability of Critical Tier Services
• Enhancements to Change Management and Pipeline Automation
• Customer-centric Availability Products and Programs
• Operational Excellence
• Hyperforce Transition

Monitoring, Alerting and Response

In order to achieve high availability of any given system, we have to ensure that we are constantly receiving the right signals and telemetry to detect issues early. Meaningful alerts along with extensive system monitoring frameworks are critical to ensuring issues can be resolved quickly. All Technology services on the Salesforce platform are instituting a framework of telemetry, alerting, and overall monitoring capabilities. Not only will this improve the time to resolve issues, but with the necessary improvements our engineers should be able to detect and prevent problems before the issues escalate and impact customers. 

Network Availability and Resilience

As demand for online services surged over the past years, the reliability and resilience of Salesforce’s network infrastructure is now more critical than ever. Our senior architecture team is driving multiple features to provide redundancy throughout the network infrastructure. This includes providing redundant capabilities for Content Delivery Network (CDN) services, Domain Name System (DNS) services, Edge network pathing, and other network infrastructure with potential circular dependencies.

High Availability of Critical Tier Services

Salesforce is establishing a new framework to ensure the high availability of the platform, by instituting extra resilience measures for the most critical service tiers on the Salesforce platform.  In addition, the definition of critical tier services is changing to include vital portions of network infrastructure required to keep the platform stable as well as services that significantly affect the frequency, impact, and resolution time of incidents.

Enhancements to Change Management and Pipeline Automation

Automation is one of the most effective methods of reducing the potential for human error.  When mistakes or bugs are introduced, it is critical to be able to quickly and easily roll back changes. Thus, a focused approach to automating the development pipeline is critical, especially for new development paths that have not yet been fully automated. We’re also enhancing our change management process with guardrails and improved training for the entire Salesforce Technology organization, to ensure a culture of fast-paced innovation without compromising on platform resiliency and redundancy.

Customer-centric Availability Products and Programs

We know that availability should be measured based on how our customers experience the platform’s health. Therefore, the new availability program will include new features to allow our customers to visualize their own availability panorama. This includes data pertaining to the health of the platform’s shared services, as well as specific instance and service availability. The new features will be delivered through new interfaces such as the Pulse platform and will power a personalized experience on our next-generation Trust status site.

Operational Excellence

In addition to the improvements specifically focused on change management at Salesforce, we are continuing to drive the innovation of how services are managed with the Salesforce service ownership model. Service ownership involves managing a service through its entire lifecycle and responding quickly when there are issues. Service owners are the engineers at Salesforce that are responsible for building, improving, and maintaining the many products and features that our customers have come to rely upon. The service ownership model involves multiple facets such as a rigorous on-call framework for all Salesforce Technology teams, as well as using deep AI-powered insights to improve how teams respond to, investigate, and prevent problems before they impact our services’ availability.

Hyperforce Transition

Our next-generation infrastructure architecture, known as Hyperforce, is a key pillar in the Salesforce strategy of providing highly resilient services that customers can access from anywhere.  By building on over 2 decades of Salesforce innovation, Hyperforce leverages the power of public cloud to bring all of Salesforce products under one roof, enabling technology alignment, and leading to new and speedier innovations in the long-term, and into more regions than ever before. Hyperforce brings data residency to 16 countries in 2022 as well as new capabilities, such as the EU Operating Zone.