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  • Anzhelika Serhiienko
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What are Salesforce Evergreen Function Use Cases and Limitations?

Evergreen function is a new serverless environment powered by Kubernetes for the Customer 360 platform that integrates Heroku's decade-long experience in creating extensible container runtimes and highly efficient data stores with Lighting functionality.

Features of Evergreen cloud service ensure seamless access to Customer 360 data and support open programming languages, commonly used high-performance data stores, and architectural patterns. Due to them, your development teams can become more productive.

Moreover, serverlessness means that solutions built with this function consume no resources when idle and it can significantly reduce costs on hosting another platform for service processing.

It is possible due to a Serverless Execution Model that represents a fully secured and stateless data container within which codes run dynamically.

A wide scope of actions like an HTTP request, alert monitoring or uploading of a data file can set these codes in action.

Then the code is sent to the cloud provider as function and the user will be charged for only what he consumes.

On top of it, Evergreen is an inseparable Salesforce part that means that you don't need to set up extra authentication or networking.

There are multiple features that are involved in this environment, among which are:

Functions-as-a-Service

It allows building business logic and event processing in programming languages like Apex, Node.js, and Java. Functions can be triggered directly from Apex or using Platform Events with many more invocation types and event sources to come.

Microservices

Microservice patterns are used to build serverless HTTP apps and APIs that can be quickly transformed by developer teams of any size into complex solutions.

Managed Data Stores

These data stores include Postgres, Apache Kafka, and Redis that empower Salesforce Data APIs for real-time eventing and high-performance persistence.
All these features depend on the industries they are used for and come with built-in customer context powered by the Salesforce data model and low-code components.

What makes Evergreen Function unique is that it:
  • Is a completely new platform and paradigm and is a part of the Salesforce family
  • Is the best way to build the deep and engaging solution
  • Uses Java, Javascript, and Apex to build functions/services
  • Doesn't require extra authentication
  • Handles situations where you get Salesforce Limits
  • Is a fully serverless platform

With the help of Salesforce function, you can build complex custom and, at the same time, scalable solutions that require a huge amount of resources.

In other words, if you increase the load on functions and the code, it can be scaled. You can roll out two or three functions at a time and distribute queries among them.

Also, they support several programming languages that enable working with already created solutions, frameworks, and libraries. It means that you can take an existing library in Node.js, or Java and do anything with them, for example, work with files.
 
Generally, If you need to build a custom solution, the Salesforce function is the best choice.

Salesforce Evergreen Function Use Cases
Salesforce Evergreen Use CasesSalesforce Evergreen Function 
 
Here are areas where you can apply the Evergreen function instead of basic Salesforce functionality:

#1 Database Operation
This function can be applied to execute financial calculations and work-order generation.

#2 Elastic & Event-Driven Computing
Evergreen can help with image and file processing and demanding queries.

#3 Creating Reusable Backend Logic
You can perform data validation cleansing and building web APIs over your data.
What is more, Salesforce Evergreen functions can manage quite big financial calculations and custom analytics.

#4 Salesforce Backup of Large Data Sets
There are quite a few third-party solutions and services that can help with Salesforce data backup.

But all third-party services work with queries and might reach the limits quite fast. Especially, if the license doesn't allow a big number of queries.

The key advantage of the Salesforce function is that you won't reach your limits on system queries.
So if you need to deal with big data volumes for backup, the function is a good option.

#5 Files Migration and Parsing
Salesforce function is a great helper in work with files.
First, you can easily migrate files from Lightning Web Component to Google Drive or to Salesforce.
Next, you can leverage the Salesforce function for parsing files.
For example, you can parse CVs and fill in field values in your Salesforce org automatically.
Based on my experience, the Salesforce function is the best for such tasks. You can do it from UI or call it from Apex.
 
#6 Custom Development of Artificial Intelligence Solutions
Using Salesforce Function, you can even develop custom AI solutions.

For example, one of our clients works in the agricultural industry.
His request was to process data collected by satellites.

And, based on this data, AI should make a decision.
And in this case, the Salesforce function would work the best.

You can also create small microservices that can be re-used from different places to perform different business tasks.

Salesforce Evergreen Function Limitations
 
Salesforce Evergreen LimitationsSalesforce Evergreen Function Limitations
 
Despite their obvious versatility and benefits, there are still some issues with Salesforce Evergreen functions because they are still in the pilot version.

For example, it wasn't possible to enable Evergreen Functions in the developer's preview mode till the Spring, 21 release in February.

Also, we ran into some problems with authorization in Heroku.
Moreover, I noticed that currently Java and Apex are not available and Salesforce functions support only JavaScript and TypeScript.

There is already an npm dependency available for JavaScript. However, there is still no Maven dependency for Java.

Also, CLI (Command Line) is the only invocation method available to try out Salesforce functions.

Check out where to call Evergreen function from, how it works and where to find Salesforce Evergreen function (https://ascendix.com/blog/salesforce-evergreen-program/) (https://ascendix.com/blog/salesforce-evergreen-program/), and how to start working with it.
SOLVED
2 replies

Is Salesforce Evergreen ready for Production Development?

Hello Community,

Salesforce Developer Blog (https://developer.salesforce.com/blogs/2019/11/introducing-salesforce-evergreen.html)said that a limited access developer preview of Evergreen will be available with the Spring ’20 release in February, but I couldn't find more solid information about it. 

Is Evergreen ready for Production Development?