Salesforce Event Relay is Generally Available

We’re excited to announce that Event Relay for AWS is now Generally Available! Event Relay is a big part of how we’re building a unified developer experience that spans the Salesforce and AWS platforms. In this post, you’ll hear how Event Relay helps developers save time by streamlining bi-directional event driven integration between Amazon EventBridge and the Salesforce Event Bus.

The power of events

Event-driven architectures are flexible integration patterns that drive real-time customer experiences at scale. They’re a big part of how Salesforce builds new products, like Salesforce Genie, and they are essential for customers. Events are a great way to synchronize data, monitor activities, and power notifications between Salesforce and external systems.

One of the most common integration projects we see is connecting Salesforce and AWS. Bringing these platforms together with events gives customers the ability to extend Salesforce’s clouds to the custom apps and services they’ve built in AWS. Before Event Relay, customers needed to use middleware or write custom code using Salesforce APIs, like the Pub Sub API. These integrations took time and required developer expertise to implement and maintain. That’s why we built Event Relay. We wanted to create a simpler way to connect Salesforce and AWS with the power of events.

Connection between Salesforce applications and AWS’s services using Event Relay

Integration out of the box

Event Relay lets developers natively create bi-directional event-driven integrations without custom code or middleware. Event Relay automatically delivers events to Amazon EventBridge, and developers can set up an API Destination in EventBridge to publish events back to Salesforce.

Event path when using Event Relay

A good way to think about Event Relay is that it’s a subscriber that listens to the events that have been published in Salesforce, and then delivers them to EventBridge in real time. Event Relay is a managed subscription service, which means that Salesforce establishes the connection on behalf of a developer and does basic monitoring to make sure your relays are healthy. Event Relay also keeps track of the event that was delivered to EventBridge, and it will resume deliveries if there’s a temporary connectivity issue with AWS. This doesn’t just make it easier to use a relay in production, it also avoids delivering events that you’re already received in EventBridge.

By tapping into the platform events and Change Data Capture events that you’re already using in Salesforce, Event Relay provides a straightforward way to extend platform tools to AWS services. Admins and developers can write event-powered Apex and Flows that interact in real time with custom apps in AWS or services like Lambda. For example, if your team already has email processes set up in AWS’ Simple Notification Service (SNS), you can easily trigger the processes from your Salesforce org with Event Relay and an Apex trigger. You could also easily sync data changes from Salesforce to AWS databases with Change Data Capture events.

Putting Event Relay to work

So, how do you start relaying events? All you need is a named credential in Salesforce and a platform event channel. A named credential stores your AWS Account ID and the region you want to relay your events. A platform event channel defines which events you want to relay to Amazon EventBridge. After your named credential and platform event channel are ready, you can create an event relay with the Tooling API.

Event Relay configuration

Each event relay you make shows up as a partner event source in Amazon EventBridge that you can connect to an event bus. Once your events are in EventBridge, you can specify EventBridge rules to filter events and send them to your desired targets. EventBridge directly integrates with over 20 AWS services, and you can use Lambda and Step Functions to send events to even more services.

Availability & pricing

Event Relay is free to use and works with high volume platform events and Change Data Capture. The events delivered to Amazon EventBridge count against an org’s event delivery entitlement, which can always be increased by purchasing more platform event add-ons.

Up next

We’re excited that Event Relay makes it easy to build experiences that span Salesforce and AWS, but we want to make what we’ve built even better. As we think about what’s next, we plan to shift focus and build a setup experience that makes Event Relay accessible to admins and easier to monitor at a glance. We’re imagining no-code tools to create, manage, and monitor event relays with actionable insights that show how your relays are performing.

Start relaying events

If Event Relay seems like a good fit for your project, head to our developer documentation to learn more. We’ve got detailed instructions on how you can put it to work. We can’t wait to see what you build with Event Relay.

About the author

Alexandra (Sasha) Golubova

Alexandra (Sasha) Golubova is an Associate Product Manager at Salesforce, working on Event Relay within Platform Developer Services.