Accelerating Salesforce and AWS Integration with Event Relays

Salesforce and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are making it easier than ever for customers to build experiences that work across both platforms. With the Spring ’22 Release, Salesforce is rolling out improvements to authorization, data virtualization, and event-driven integration with AWS. You’ll find an overview of all the new features coming to Named Credentials, Salesforce Connect, and the Salesforce Event Bus in Salesforce Adapters and Event Relays for AWS on the Salesforce Developers’ Blog.

This post takes a deep dive into the new Event Relay service that sends events from the Salesforce Event Bus to Amazon EventBridge.

Event-driven integrations are an increasingly important part of how Salesforce and our customers build real-time experiences that perform at scale. When data changes, events are published and put to work on lots of use cases including synchronizing datasets, monitoring activities, and powering notifications between systems. This is a big reason for why Salesforce customers publish and subscribe to billions of events every month.

One of the most common integration projects we see is connecting Salesforce and AWS. Customers love the low-code tools and flexibility of Salesforce, but often need to connect those tools to data or custom apps and services they’ve built on AWS. To bring these platforms together in the past, teams have needed to use middleware or build custom CometD clients to subscribe to events and send them to AWS services like Kinesis or EventBridge. It’s a tried-and-true pattern that works at scale, but building that integration adds upfront cost and long-term maintenance adds even more. That’s why we’re excited to launch native tools that streamline bidirectional event-driven integrations between Salesforce and AWS.

Introducing Event Relays

The new Event Relay service subscribes to platform events and Change Data Capture events that are published by a Salesforce org and relays those events to EventBridge, the AWS service for event ingestion and orchestration. With EventBridge, you can direct events to other AWS services and use the EventBridge API destinations feature to send events back to Salesforce or other apps.

Event Relays are configured for an event channel. That means the channels you use to group, filter, and enrich events can also be relayed to EventBridge. After a relay has been configured for a channel, it appears as a partner event source in EventBridge where its events can be directed to AWS Services.

Inside Event Relays

We used much of the same technology that powers the new Event Bus runtime and Pub/Sub API to build out the Event Relay service. Because Event Relays are all about delivering events, we needed to add new subscription management tools to streamline the process of getting events into EventBridge. Event Relays automatically keep track of the ReplayID of the last event they’ve consumed. That means a relay resumes interrupted subscriptions right where it left off, ensuring resilience in the case of a temporary outage. Of course, keeping track of which events have been relayed also avoids processing events that have already been delivered to EventBridge.

Event-driven innovation

So now you know how Salesforce Event Relays and EventBridge API destinations make it easier to integrate Salesforce and AWS with native bidirectional eventing. But let’s be honest, integration isn’t the end goal here. The end goal is building experiences that make a difference for your customers and your organization. This is where things get exciting. With Event Relays and EventBridge your team can focus on delivering new features instead of dealing with integration. Rather than investing time to develop custom event subscribers against the Streaming API or the Pub/Sub API, your team can build the custom applications that actually need those events.

Integrating Salesforce and AWS with events also decouples the work that needs to happen on each platform, giving your teams more flexibility. Event-powered Flows and Apex can respond to events published by AWS Services. Instead of bringing in a developer, your admin can create flows that publish and subscribe to Lambda Functions or tap into the messaging systems you’ve already fine-tuned with Kinesis. Similarly, your AWS developers can use the events coming from Salesforce to enrich their custom apps and services that run in AWS.

Join our pilot and start relaying events

We have scheduled a customer pilot for Event Relays in early March during the Spring ’22 Release, and they are expected to be generally available in Summer 2022. The initial launch will focus on the API experience of creating and managing an Event Relay, with future releases including a declarative experience in Salesforce Setup. Check out the product roadmap on the Architect Digital Home.

If you’re interested in participating in the Event Relay pilot, we’d love your feedback! Please contact your Salesforce Account Executive to sign up for the pilot.

Further Reading

• AWS and Salesforce Announce Expansive Partnership to Unify Developer Experiences and Launch New Intelligent Applications
• Salesforce Adapters and Event Relays for AWS — Join the Pilot!
• What is Amazon EventBridge?
• The New Salesforce Event Bus
• Pub/Sub API: Building Event-Driven Integrations Just Got Even Easier
• Platform Events Developer Guide
• Change Data Capture Developer Guide