This topic describes Salesforce on Alibaba Cloud customer relationship management (CRM) instances. This topic also describes the instance types and naming conventions of instance IDs.
Instance
Salesforce on Alibaba Cloud CRM uses a multi-tenant architecture based on the Hyperforce platform of Salesforce and is adapted to the cloud infrastructure of Alibaba Cloud. The underlying services of Salesforce on Alibaba Cloud CRM are deployed across three zones in an Alibaba Cloud region. This way, high availability and disaster recovery capability are ensured if one of the three zones fails and multiple independent components in another zone fail. The core of underlying services provides main features of modules such as Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Salesforce Platform. Core services are logically divided into independent units. Each unit is a collection of customer services based on a multi-tenant architecture. A unit is called an instance or a cell. If an instance fails, only the tenant organization hosted on the instance and corresponding users are affected. Tenant organizations hosted on other instances and their users are not affected.
Instance type
A Salesforce on Alibaba Cloud CRM instance can be a production instance or a sandbox instance based on the usage of the tenant organization hosted on the instance. If the tenant organization created when you purchase a Salesforce on Alibaba Cloud CRM instance is for production, the instance is a production instance. If the tenant organization created when you purchase a Salesforce on Alibaba Cloud CRM instance is for development and testing, the instance is a sandbox instance.
Instance ID
The ID of a Salesforce on Alibaba Cloud CRM instance is used to identify the instance. Format of a production instance: CHN + Number. Format of a sandbox instance: CHN + Number + S. Examples:
If the ID of a Salesforce on Alibaba Cloud CRM instance is CHN1, the instance is a production instance.
If the ID of a Salesforce on Alibaba Cloud CRM instance is CHN3S, the instance is a sandbox instance.