A customer’s enterprise architect has identified requirements around caching, queuing, error handling, alerts, retries, event...

When an enterprise architect identifies infrastructure-level requirements such as caching, queuing, and complex event handling, it signals a need for a dedicated integration layer. Salesforce is an engagement platform, not a dedicated message broker or Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). For complex event handling in a publish/subscribe scenario, the architect should recommend leveraging middleware to act as the central nervous system of the integration landscape.

The middleware provides a robust environment to manage the lifecycle of a message. It can receive a single event from a publisher (like Salesforce via Platform Events) and then route that message to multiple active subscribers. This decoupling ensures that Salesforce doesn't need to manage the connection state or retry logic for every downstream system. Middleware tools are specifically designed to handle "Quality of Service" (QoS) requirements like guaranteed delivery, message sequencing, and dead-letter queuing, which are difficult to manage natively at scale within Salesforce limits.

Option A is incorrect because shifting from Fire-and-Forget to Request-Reply generally decreases performance and scalability due to the synchronous nature of the wait time. Option C is also incorrect; protocol translation (e.g., SOAP to REST) and heavy message transformation are exactly what middleware tools are built for. By performing these tasks in middleware, you conserve Salesforce’s Apex CPU limits and maintain a cleaner, more maintainable CRM environment. Therefore, using middleware for routing and event handling is the standard architectural recommendation for a mature enterprise program.