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?