The Force.com Multitenant Architecture: Understanding the Design of Salesforce.com’s Internet Application Development Platform

Force.com is the preeminent on-demand application development platform in use today, supporting some 47,000+ organizations. Individual enterprises and commercial software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors trust the platform to deliver robust, reliable, Internet-scale applications. To meet the extreme demands of its large user population, Force.com’s foundation is a metadata-driven software architecture that enables multitenant applications. This paper explains the patented technology that makes the Force.com platform fast, scalable, and secure for any type of application.