Why Salesforce Performs Maintenance

Learn why maintenance occurs and how it improves your Salesforce instance’s performance, security, and availability.

Like for a car or bicycle, regular maintenance is necessary to support your Salesforce org and to keep it running securely and reliably.

Here are some instance and maintenance basics. For a deeper dive, check out Understand Salesforce Architecture on Trailhead.

Your Salesforce org is hosted on an instance. An instance is a collection of physical database servers and other networking hardware that you use to access your org when and where you need it. Instead of one server dedicated to each org, an instance hosts many customer orgs using a multitenant architecture. With multitenant architecture, your org has complete data isolation while sharing the same resources, infrastructure, and code base with other customer orgs. Salesforce learns from usage trends and evolves to meet your needs.

Salesforce doesn’t put all its eggs in one basket, so to speak. Our multitenant architecture is redundant to protect against data loss due to unforeseen downtime. Your data is stored across multiple data centers in risk-diverse locations. If a data center that hosts your instance is unavailable or fails, another data center is ready to continue service.

Allocated downtime for maintenance keeps the Salesforce infrastructure current and allows for innovation. Your org and its data live in the cloud, but the cloud has a physical component (or several) in the form of hardware. Hardware isn’t infallible. It must be maintained, upgraded, and sometimes decommissioned to improve performance and security, and to support your needs.

Salesforce uses instances to schedule maintenance and to roll out upgrades in controlled phases. For example, major release upgrades are staggered by instance. Using instances, a phased release ensures that if any issues are uncovered, they’re addressed quickly before they impact every org.