Organizations of all kinds use Salesforce and AWS’ foundational tools to help them build modern customer experiences that use enterprise data in real-time between Salesforce applications and AWS services. They rely on Salesforce to effectively manage customer relationships, and they build new applications on the Salesforce Platform that leverage the power of AWS for compute, storage, and database needs.
Through a unified developer experience, Salesforce and AWS are making it easier for developers to build and launch custom applications, natively leverage AWS services in Salesforce, and securely connect data and workflows across both Salesforce and AWS.
Today, we are excited to offer a full suite of tools that help you streamline development while making the Salesforce and AWS platforms interoperable. Now in Pilot, new Salesforce Connect adapters and Event Relay are available to connect your Salesforce org to your AWS services.
Introducing the connectors
The new Salesforce Connect adapter exposes data services from your AWS account, and your admins and developers can then use those services in their Salesforce applications. In addition, Event Relay simplifies bi-directional integration between AWS services and Salesforce, accelerating your application development.
Virtualize data with the Salesforce Connect adapter for DynamoDB
The new Salesforce Connect adapter for Amazon DynamoDB allows administrators to seamlessly and quickly integrate AWS data natively with Salesforce business applications — without the complexity of traditional ETL. You can connect Amazon DynamoDB data sources to Salesforce through external objects and take advantage of features offered by the Salesforce Platform, such as Lightning Flow, Indirect Lookups to native objects, and more.
DynamoDB is now supported as a type of external data source, allowing one or more external objects to be created from a given table in DynamoDB. Once administrators specify how the table(s) are structured, the new adapter renders data stored in DynamoDB as if it were any other object with its own tab. Developers can even write SOQL queries and Apex against this new data source without writing application code to access DynamoDB’s custom API.
Create bi-directional event integrations with Event Relay
Event Relay makes it easier than ever to build event-driven applications that span across Salesforce and AWS. With Event Relay, customers can send events to Amazon EventBridge without having to build an integration or use middleware. Instead of spending time building and maintaining integrations, developers can focus on building the capabilities that their teams need most.
Integrating Salesforce and AWS with events accelerates innovation by decoupling the work that needs to happen on each platform. AWS developers can use EventBridge to direct events to AWS services or Salesforce. Salesforce admins can build flows and write Apex that publish and subscribe to AWS events. This empowers Salesforce admins to build dynamic experiences with Salesforce Platform tools that interact with AWS services.
Authenticate seamlessly and securely with Named Credentials
These new capabilities interact securely with AWS by way of a new generation of Named Credentials. This new feature set enhances support for the AWS Signature V4 authentication protocol, provides Salesforce administrators better security via Permission Sets, and allows multiple Salesforce apps to share credentials defined by Identity and Access Management (IAM).
Administrators can provide granular security to their AWS resources via IAM, and then create a named principal for Salesforce to leverage. To reduce the administrative burden around duplicative permission management, multiple Salesforce applications can either share the credentials for a certain named principal, or define separate configurations. Either way, Salesforce users are explicitly granted access to make those callouts via a permission set referenced by the external credential.
Conclusion
Bringing the Salesforce and AWS platforms together will help customers build awesome experiences faster than ever. We’re looking for customers to pilot our new capabilities for data virtualization, eventing, and authorization, and we are eager to get your feedback. Looking over the horizon, we’re excited to deliver even more seamless solutions as AWS and Salesforce continue to invest in this partnership.
To get started with the new DynamoDB adapter, Event Relay, and Named Credentials, contact your account representative. They’ll enroll you in the Pilot program and connect you to our product team who’ll send you the relevant documentation and materials to test the capabilities in your sandbox. The new DynamoDB adapter and Named Credentials features are ready to pilot now and the Event Relay pilot will kick off later in the Spring ’22 Release.
About the authors
Ross Belmont is a Director of Product Management covering Platform Data Services. He has more than a decade of experience with the Salesforce ecosystem.
Tyson Read is a Director of Product Management working on event-driven systems like the Salesforce Event Bus. He’s a former conservation biologist and bio-mechanist who’s passionate about sustainability and technology.
Stephan Chandler Garcia is a Lead Developer Advocate at Salesforce focusing on application development, Experience Cloud, and security. He’s spent many years working with the Salesforce Platform as a customer, partner, and ISV.