I have always been impressed with the architecture and design of the Salesforce.com platform ever since I started looking at it. The multitenant solutions they have found to common problems such as:
- how to handle security at an organization, user, profile and field levels
- how to manage data between the client and the backend (ORM)
- how to create extendable, intuitive and attractive user interfaces
and bring it all together in one marketable platform is really an epic endeavor which they accomplished with grace.
I often ask myself, “how did they do it? What technologies did they use under the covers to provide this platform and these services?” To get a glimpse into these questions, watch the video below where Walter Macklem, CTO of the Force.com Platform, talks specifically about the following behind the scenes topics.
Data Infrastructure:
- Building blocks of the Force.com services
- Hardware Topology
- Relational Database
- Distributed File System
- Search
- High Availability
- Backups
- Disaster Recovery
Multitenant Data Management:
- Platformatize the raw data infrastructure to make it work for the cloud.
- Enable multiple customers to utilize a shared resource pool.
Internal Development with Data:
- Dogfooding. How do internal Salesforce engineers build on top of this multitenant data platform?