Event-Driven Salesforce Is No Longer Optional

Why Trigger-Centric Thinking Breaks Down at Enterprise Scale (2025–2026) 

Salesforce teams tend to build automation the way the platform first taught them to think: a record changes, logic runs, the world is updated “right now.” For years, that model - implemented in Apex triggers, record-triggered flows, and a constellation of declarative rules - worked well enough. 

Then orgs grew up. 

Enterprise Salesforce in 2026 is less a single application and more an integration hub: multiple delivery teams, multiple downstream systems, and volumes that make “just do it in the same transaction” quietly expensive. In that environment, the familiar trigger-centric mindset begins to fail - not because triggers are wrong, but because synchronous coupling becomes the default architecture unless you intervene. 

Event-driven design is that intervention. Not as hype, not as a buzzword, and not as a wholesale replacement for record-triggered automation. As a way to make one thing true again: a user save should be responsible for the minimum work required to preserve system correctness, not every side effect your enterprise can imagine. 

The unstated assumption behind trigger-centric automation 

Most trigger-centric automation embeds an assumption that rarely gets challenged: if a record changes, all consequences of that change should be computed immediately, inside the same unit of work. 

That assumption becomes costly because Salesforce transactions have shared constraints. Whatever executes “now” executes in the same budget of compute time and resource limits as everything else running in that transaction. The more you pack into the synchronous path, the more you turn unrelated concerns into roommates who share the same kitchen, the same fridge, and the same fire exit. 

The failure mode is not usually functional. It’s architectural. Systems remain “correct,” but they become harder to predict and harder to change. 

Salesforce doesn’t just support events - it has event semantics 

Salesforce provides multiple mechanisms that let you design around synchronous coupling. The two most commonly confused are Platform Events and Change Data Capture (CDC). 

Platform Events are intentionally published messages. You define an event type, then publish instances of it from Apex, Flow, or external publishers. Salesforce makes the transactional semantics explicit by offering publish behaviors: you can publish immediately or only after the transaction commits successfully. If you choose “Publish Immediately,” subscribers can receive the event even if the transaction later rolls back, and subscribers can sometimes receive it before the record data is committed. If you choose “Publish After Commit,” the event is published only if the transaction commits. 

CDC events are different. CDC is a streaming capability designed to publish record-change events - create, update, delete, undelete - for supported objects. Salesforce documents CDC as an integration pattern for synchronizing changes to external systems in near real time, and it describes change events being generated after commit as part of its considerations.  

That distinction - intentional events versus change replication - matters because it determines whether your “event stream” is communicating business meaning or simply mirroring database mutation. 

Why “publish after commit” is the real dividing line 

If you take nothing else from this article, take this: in Salesforce, event-driven architecture isn’t primarily about “async.” It’s about transaction boundaries. 

Salesforce is explicit that Platform Events can be configured so that event messages are published only after a transaction commits successfully, and not published if the transaction fails. This exists for a reason: many subscribers rely on the assumption that the data they query after receiving an event is actually committed. 

The platform also tells you the uncomfortable counterpart: when publishing immediately, subscribers can receive an event before committed data is visible.  

When teams say, “We’re going event-driven,” but don’t state which publish behavior they’re using and why, they aren’t making an architectural decision. They’re making a wish. 

The underappreciated reality: events aren’t a database table 

Another place architects lose credibility is when events are treated like records. 

Salesforce retains high-volume platform events for a limited period (Salesforce documents retention behavior, including replay and retention windows) and assigns a ReplayId that subscribers can use to retrieve events within the retention window. It also explicitly notes that event messages aren’t queryable via SOQL/SOSL and aren’t used directly in reports or list views.  

This has practical consequences: if you need an audit trail, build one. If you need durable processing guarantees beyond what the event retention window supports, build the durability in your consuming system or in a persistence layer you control. 

Event-driven architecture in Salesforce is messaging, not storage. 

What event-driven design actually changes in enterprise orgs 

Trigger-centric designs tend to grow by addition. Each new requirement attaches another automation to the same data change event. Over time, one record update becomes responsible for an expanding universe of side effects: notifications, replication, enrichment, scoring, downstream sync, “just one more” cross-object update. 

Event-driven design changes this by making a clean separation: the transaction that updates a record does the minimum required to keep Salesforce internally consistent, then it emits a signal for downstream work to happen elsewhere, later, or in a different context. 

This isn’t a claim that “later” is always better. It’s a claim that synchronous coupling should be a deliberate choice, not the default. 

Publishing and subscribing is operational work, not just architecture 

This is where many Salesforce teams stumble: they adopt Platform Events or CDC and assume that “event-driven” automatically grants resilience. It doesn’t. 

Salesforce documents that publishing in Apex queues the publish request and publishes asynchronously; success from the publish call reflects that the request was queued, not that a subscriber processed it. That’s good platform behavior, but it means your enterprise reliability is now partly your responsibility: idempotency, retries, and observability become first-class requirements. 

And on the subscriber side, you need governance: schema versioning, consumer ownership, and an explicit answer to “what happens if this consumer is down?” 

If your team doesn’t want that responsibility, staying trigger-centric will feel simpler. Until the system grows enough that simplicity becomes fragility. 

The correct enterprise posture: synchronous for correctness, events for consequences

A defensible enterprise rule is this: do not use the synchronous save path as a dumping ground for consequences. 

Keep the synchronous path focused on correctness and immediate user feedback. Push non-critical side effects into event consumption paths. Use “Publish After Commit” when subscribers require committed state. Use CDC when your goal is replication of record changes, not expression of business intent.  

This posture doesn’t eliminate triggers or record-triggered flows. It reframes their responsibility. It makes “what happens now” a small, predictable set of actions - and makes “what happens because of this” extensible without constantly reopening the same transaction. 

The conclusion that holds up in architecture review 

Event-driven Salesforce is not an “advanced pattern” reserved for special teams. It is the platform-supported way to design for transaction boundaries, reduce synchronous coupling, and support multiple consumers without turning every record update into a monolithic workflow. 

Triggers and record-triggered flows remain essential. But in enterprise orgs, they are no longer sufficient as the primary coordination mechanism for all consequences of data change. 

Synchronous automation should be small, deliberate, and built for correctness. 

Everything else should be designed to happen after commit, in decoupled paths whose guarantees are explicit, because Salesforce gives you the controls to do that, and it documents what those controls mean.