Introducing Salesforce Well-Architected

Today, we’re sharing the first release of Salesforce Well-Architected to help you design and roadmap healthy solutions with the Salesforce Customer 360 Platform. Salesforce Well-Architected provides guidance and resources for you to create architectures that are Trusted, Easy and Adaptable.

Trusted solutions protect stakeholders.
Easy solutions deliver value fast.
Adaptable solutions evolve with the business.

Salesforce Well-Architected is the work of product teams and implementation experts from across Salesforce and our ecosystem. Our goal is to have Salesforce Well-Architected feel like another, experienced architect in your network — with recommendations and opinionated views you can use to validate your thinking, challenge your assumptions and gain insight into areas that are new to you.

In this post, we’ll take a closer look at what we’ve released today and what you can expect in future releases.

What’s in this release?

Prescriptive Architectural Guidance from Salesforce In our first release, we’ve published a series of white papers, organized around Trusted, Easy and Adaptable architectural considerations for the Salesforce Customer 360 Platform. You can see how topics are arranged below:

Within the various white papers, you will find opinionated guidance about what sound architectural thinking for a given topic should involve, as well as clear views on how to create particular capabilities within your solutions. We also provide example patterns and anti-patterns to look for in your designs, in your org, in code, in configuration, within your documentation and more. Last, you’ll find overviews of tools and resources available from Salesforce, relevant to a particular topic.

Key Fundamentals While working on well-architected, we discovered some key gaps in basic documentation about fundamental architectural topics related to Salesforce. So we added these resources to the website. You’ll find a new Architecture Basics document, intended to help architects who are new to working with Salesforce, or practitioners who are familiar with Salesforce but new to architectural work, understand how core behaviors of the Salesforce Platform will impact your solutions. You’ll also find a refreshed version of the Salesforce Platform Multitenant white paper, which goes deeper into the architecture powering the Salesforce Platform itself.

Changes to Navigation We’ve changed the navigation on architect.salesforce.com to put Well-Architected front and center, and make it easier to find the resources we know you’ve come to rely on, like:

• Product data models and templates
• Architect Decision Guides
• and the Salesforce product Roadmap Explorer

Get started with Salesforce Well-Architected at architect.salesforce.com/well-architected — and share your feedback! You’ll see links to provide feedback throughout every section of well-architected. Please let us know what you’d like to see next, what could be improved, and anything you think could make well-architected useful for you.

What’s next?

We’re celebrating Salesforce Well-Architected all throughout Dreamforce. We’ll share more about what’s in store at Dreamforce later this month — including more about how you can get hands-on with Salesforce Well-Architected in expert-led workshops. We’ll also share Salesforce Well-Architected workshop content with leaders of our global Architect Trailblazer Groups later this year — so if you can’t make it to Dreamforce, you can still dive into expert sessions with other architects in your community. If you haven’t joined your local group yet, don’t wait. (And if you don’t see a group in your community, apply to start one.)

Building Salesforce Well-Architected has been an incredible journey. You can explore more about some of what went on behind the scenes in our Building Salesforce Well-Architected and Slack for Architects series. Salesforce Well-Architected is the work of a whole ecosystem of experts inside Salesforce and across the ecosystem. Thank you to everyone who shared feedback, contributed guidance and resources, attended information sessions and workshops, read and shared our blogs — and to those of you reading (and providing your feedback!) right now. I also want to thank the amazing members of the Architect Relations team: Marc Braga, Tom Leddy, Marissa Lowe & Susannah St-Germain.

This release is just the beginning.