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Salesforce developers integration patterns

Integration is where Salesforce architecture choices show up first. The wrong pattern works fine for 100 records and dies at 100,000. This page is the practitioner reference for choosing the right pattern up front, with the failure modes that help you predict where the next outage will come from.

04 steps · 04 FAQs

Every Salesforce integration outage I've seen was an architecture choice from 18 months earlier finally hitting scale.

Practical steps

How to actually do this.

  1. 01

    Define the integration contract

    Source of truth, direction, sync pattern, frequency, error path. Write it down before you build. Contract changes mid-build are the cost surprise.

  2. 02

    Build the happy path with monitoring

    Every callout has a logging hook. Every event has a counter. Every error path has an alert. Skipping observability is borrowing time you'll repay with interest.

  3. 03

    Stress-test before launch

    Run 10× expected volume through it. The integration that works at design volume is not the integration you're shipping.

  4. 04

    Document the recovery procedure

    When (not if) the integration breaks, the on-call needs the recovery steps in 30 seconds. Document them. Test them. Update them.

Frequently asked

Common questions on integration patterns.

When should I use Platform Events vs. callouts?

Platform Events for fire-and-forget notifications where the receiver doesn't need to ack. Callouts for synchronous request/response with the external system as source of truth. Mixing them produces architectures that are hard to reason about and hard to monitor.

What's the right pattern for high-volume sync?

Bulk API for batches over 200 records, REST for individual writes, Platform Events for change-data-capture broadcast. The mistake is using REST for everything because it's familiar, your governor limits will let you, until they don't.

How do I handle integration failures?

Three layers: (1) retry with exponential backoff for transient errors, (2) dead-letter queue for retries-exhausted records, (3) alerting on DLQ depth so you know before customers do. Skip any layer and silent data loss is your default mode.

Async vs. sync: how do I decide?

Async by default. Sync only when the user is waiting on the result. Sync integrations couple your Salesforce uptime to the external system's uptime, and the external system always has lower SLA than you do.

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