Introducing Salesforce Availability

Availability is a topic not too many people get excited about — until something goes wrong. Customers expect their Salesforce orgs to “just work”. And as architects, it’s part of our responsibility to ensure that they do. But the unexpected can happen to even the most well-designed solution.

A few months ago, there were only a few places to find information about availability: the Salesforce Architects digital home and Salesforce Trust. This lack of information was a gap we wanted and needed to fill, which is why we’ve recently launched Salesforce Availability. Here you’ll find information about availability suited to a broad audience along with deeper dives, such as best practices to improve availability. But let me take a step back to discuss what availability is, why it’s important to architects, and how you can improve availability in your org today.

What is availability?

Availability is generally defined as the percentage of time a service successfully handles requests. Salesforce measures and tracks this percentage to make sure our servers and services are highly available to every customer.

While server and services availability is critical to Salesforce, even more important to us is customer-experienced availability. This type of availability is how users experience Salesforce. For example, can users log in to your org? Are data integrations populating fields? Are imports successfully loading?

Customer-experienced availability is tricky to measure since every org, every user, and every company is unique. A user’s experienced availability can also vary greatly depending on many factors, such as implementation design, geographic region, and network connection. Despite the variability and unknown factors that can affect an org’s availability, Salesforce considers availability a top priority as part of our core value of trust.

Why should I care about availability?

Availability, or lack thereof, affects everyone: you, your users, and your company. A highly available org means your users are able to continue their responsibilities while supporting your company’s growth. An org that performs poorly or has unreliable service creates frustrations and, in extreme cases, could impact a company’s finances and reputation.

As an architect, you have deep knowledge about the org design and are likely seen as the subject matter expert. When performance issues occur or downtime happens, all eyes turn to you.

What are common issues that affect availability?

Over the last 14 years in the Salesforce ecosystem, I’ve observed and found common anti-patterns that affect an org’s availability the most. As an architect, be on the lookout for:

• How critical system integrations for Salesforce and external systems handle unexpected situations, such as maintenance windows and system downtime. For example, what does recovery look like once service is restored? Is there a bulk-recovery process to help process the transaction backlog efficiently?
• How the solution scales for growth. Oftentimes we’re given requirements to design for the present, but how well does it scale if the users doubled? Similarly, can the solution handle a spike in usage without major performance degradation?
• Lack of business continuity planning. For example, is integration downtime considered by the business? If so, are there plans in place to maintain business operations despite the integration being unavailable?
• Little to no automated testing. While manual testing has its place and is necessary in certain scenarios, it’s time-consuming and often unreliable across large projects. Automated testing provides a standard, repeatable process for testers while also reducing the chance of human error.
• Not having a data backup solution or not regularly making backups of business-level data. Many times data deletion occurs due to human error, either by accidental deletion or overwriting information with incorrect data.
• Lack of monitoring and alerting when an issue occurs and no indication where the issue is found.
• A “fix it first” mentality when incidents do occur. Prioritize recovering services first, and then investigate and fix the root cause issue.

Introducing Salesforce Availability

Salesforce Availability is a new resource to learn even more about availability. We have big plans for the website and will continue to add content and features regularly. In addition, we recently launched Availability Help and Training, a new resource that discusses availability best practices in more detail.

We’re also working closely with Well-Architected to ensure these concepts are well-embedded into one framework for all Salesforce professionals to follow. Be on the lookout as we roll out tools and resources to help improve availability in the near future.

What’s next

Although Salesforce invests heavily to support availability, it’s only half of the availability picture. The other half is you. We rely on customers to partner with us and use best practices and recommendations when designing and maintaining their orgs. You, as an architect, can help by:

• Asking questions. As architects, you’re the experts. You’ve seen and experienced both poorly and well-designed and maintained orgs. This experience is helpful for surfacing edge or niche scenarios that are often overlooked or not on anyone’s radar.
• Being a resource to your company and its users. We often don’t know what we don’t know. Providing information and giving guidance to your users helps them more effectively use Salesforce while also teaching a new cohort of users in the ecosystem.

Resources

Website: Availability
Salesforce Help: Availability
Salesforce Well-Architected: Availability
Developer Blog Post: Improve Availability in Your Org