In this section of the chapter, you will discover the fascinating world of Salesforce PODs. But what is a POD? The acronym POD stands for Point of Deployment, which may sound a bit enigmatic. To better understand this, let’s start with something you may have heard of – the word “instance.” Salesforce PODs are a different name for Salesforce instances. Instances or PODs are the places where your Salesforce data is located. It is a server location where your Salesforce org is hosted and from where it operates. Does the instance equal the org? No! On the Salesforce instance, there can be multiple Salesforce orgs allocated. Of course, each Salesforce org is separated and secured, so you can’t access the information of orgs that you don’t have access to. However, orgs from different companies are located in the same instance. As you may already know, Salesforce has thousands of customers, so you may now be wondering if all of them are located in the same instance. The answer is no! Salesforce has many POD/instance locations. The separation between different instances is made geographically, so there are different instances across North America, Europe, and Asia.
In 2023, the Salesforce-managed data centers for the aforementioned services are located in the following metropolitan areas:
- Chicago, Illinois, United States (USA)
- Dallas, Texas, United States (USA)
- Frankfurt, Germany (DE)
- Kobe, Japan (JPN)
- London, United Kingdom (UK)
- London North
- London West
- Paris, France (FRA)
- Phoenix, Arizona, United States (USA)
- Tokyo, Japan (JPN)
- Washington DC, United States (USA):
- Washington DC North
- Washington DC South
In addition, Salesforce has instances served from Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure in the United States, Canada, India, Japan, Indonesia, Singapore, Brazil, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Great Britain, Korea, and Australia. These instances are in two or more separate Availability Zones within each respective country.
As you can see, Salesforce instances are located worldwide. The reason for this is strongly related to technical aspects but also legal ones. Some countries have just law regulations saying that the data related to their citizens needs to be stored in their region/country. Does it sound easy? Let’s add some complexity because apart from country differences, Salesforce instances can be configured on first-party infrastructure such as the following:
- Infrastructure owned and operated by Salesforce
- Public cloud infrastructure: Hosted on Salesforce-managed AWS infrastructure (excluding Hyperforce)
- Hyperforce infrastructure: Hosted on Salesforce-managed AWS Hyperforce infrastructure
Typically, a customer has just one org to support all services dependent on it. In simpler terms, your org will be hosted on either Salesforce’s first-party infrastructure, public cloud infrastructure, or Hyperforce infrastructure, but not on more than one of these simultaneously. Additionally, some Salesforce services may include functionality that interacts with the org but is hosted on separate infrastructure, such as Einstein features.
To summarise, Salesforce PODs or instances are simply the locations where your Salesforce org is situated. Physically, these are servers situated in data centers located in various regions around the world. So, even though we often use the phrase “cloud data” in relation to Salesforce, the data is not actually stored in the real clouds but in some familiar, solid cities such as Berlin, Chicago, or Kobe. Not as romantic, is it? But look – you might be fortunate, and your data could be located in Paris. Maybe it’s not in the cloud, but there’s no denying that Paris is equally romantic. And what about Phoenix, Arizona? Still not in the cloud, but at least it’s in “The Valley of the Sun,” right? Want to know how to check where your data is located or when you’ll get new Salesforce features? We’ll discover this in the next section.