Designing for Scale – The Real Job of a Salesforce Architect
- Vinit Jogani
- Jun 3
- 2 min read

Introduction
In the ever-evolving Salesforce ecosystem, it's easy to focus on features — automations, dashboards, and user interfaces. But true architectural excellence isn’t just about getting things to work. It’s about making them work reliably at scale, under pressure, and with strategic foresight. Welcome to the real job of Salesforce Architect.
Scaling Is Not an Afterthought
Too often, systems are built reactively — with today's problem in mind. But Salesforce Architects must look ahead. Designing for scale means anticipating future needs in:
- Data volumes
- User concurrency across teams and geographies
- Process complexity with flows, orchestrations, and approvals
- Third-party integrations (Data Cloud, MuleSoft, APIs)
- Governance frameworks to manage access, data compliance, and growth
- Data policies: Backup, Archival and Purging.
Architecture Principles That Drive Scale
1. Modular Design:
Break down functionality into smaller, reusable components: Apex services, sub flows, and Lightning Web Components. Modular implementation and reusability helps in maintainability.
2. Data Discipline:
Establish and enforce data models that optimize performance.
Look at Data Skews that may affect performance in future.
Design for faster data access by using strategies like indexes, skinny tables and even divisions.
Archival Strategy: Devise appropriate archival strategy keeping the most recent and active data in Org. Reducing size of data improves database performance and reduces locks during DML
3. Smart Automation
Use Flow as the go-to automation engine, but design with governor limits and flow triggers in mind.
Restrict to one automation engine per object for record triggered processes. Don’t mix Apex Trigger and Flows for same object.
Avoid automation sprawl.
4. Integration First Thinking
Design Integration with mix of Synchronous and event-driven interactions.
Near real time and asynchronous nature of event-driven (Platform events) interactions help in scaling the application.
Use middleware (like MuleSoft) to orchestrate integrations between multiple systems.
5. Monitoring & Governance
Architects must think about maintainability.
Data: Monitor your data usage and imply proper data backup and archival strategies to keep your Org lean in terms of data size.
Code: Use tools like Scale Centre and Apex Guru to check if your code is causing any performance issues, record locks, etc.
Final Thoughts
Being a Salesforce Architect today is more strategic than ever. It’s not about building faster — it’s about building right, so what you deliver today becomes the foundation for tomorrow’s scale, speed, and success.
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