This document summarizes the infrastructure behind Salesforce's multitenant architecture. It discusses Salesforce's hardware infrastructure which includes over 15,000 systems across multiple data centers globally. It also describes Salesforce's data infrastructure which uses an Oracle database with sharding and replication, a homegrown distributed file system, and Lucene/Solr for search. The core of Salesforce's architecture is its multitenant design where each customer's data and applications are isolated from other customers but housed on the same shared infrastructure for efficiency and scalability.
3. Salesforce statistics
• 22 North America instances, 6 EMEA instances and 2 APAC instances
• 25 sandbox instances
• 1,300,000,000+ daily transactions
• 24,000 database transactions per second at peak (equivalent to a page
view on other sites)
• 15,000+ hardware systems
• > 22 PB of raw SAN storage capacity
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4. Software Technologies Employed
• Linux for development and primary production systems
• Solaris 10 w/ ZFS
• Jetty
• Oracle
• Solr
• Memcache
• Apache QPID
• QFS
• Puppet, Razor
• Perl, Python
• Nagios
• Perforce, Git, Subversion
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5. Hardware topology
POD
• Self-contained set of hardware
• Each customer is in one pod
• Each pod services many customers
• Data persistence and System of Record
• Data processing
• Hardware mirroring
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8. Data centers
Location Function
• San Jose, CA Main Production Data Center
• Chicago, IL Production Data Center
• Reston, VA Production & Back-up Data Center
• Singapore Production Data Center
• Japan Production Data Center
• San Francisco, CA R&D Lab and Tape Archive
• London, UK Production Data Center
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14. Search
• Full-text search capability
• Wide variety of data to support:
• Structured data: id, email, phone number
• Unstructured data: long documents, short chatter posts
• Real-time indexing and querying
• 90% of events indexed in < 3 mins
• Lucene & Solr
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15. Multitenancy
• Tenant = Organization (aka Company)
• Each Organization has many sub-tenants (aka Users, Private model)
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16. Multitenancy
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(On-Premise or Hosted)
App 1
App Server
Database
OS
Server
Storage
Network
App
1
App
2 App
3
Single-Tenant
App 2
App Server
Database
OS
App 3
App Server
Database
OS
Buy, Install, Build, Tune, Upgrade
Multi-Tenant
Innovation. Not Infrastructure
Server
Storage
Network
Server
Storage
Network
One Company
Many App Stacks
Many Companies
One Shared Stack
17. Multitenant database
• To support Custom Objects, Salesforce uses:
• Arbitrary Transaction Support
• Locking
• Row caching
• To support Custom Objects, we don’t use:
• Native data typing
• Native indexing
• Foreign Key Constraints
• Query Optimization
• Stats Collection
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