The number of businesses that are adopting Salesforce is increasing year by year. And along with that the number of developments, customizations, and code changes in the Salesforce platform is also accelerating day by day, calling for a seamless DevOps automation process.
Embracing DevOps best practices helps Salesforce teams meet unique business requirements, and deliver work more quickly, effectively, and safely. And what comes as news for Salesforce Developers this year is the launch of the highly anticipated Salesforce product – DevOps Center, a platform that makes change and release management feel like a breeze while developing with Salesforce.
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First of all, why DevOps for your Salesforce?
Combining the responsibilities of software development “Dev” and Operations teams “Ops” is truly indispensable for teams to build, test, and process software releases more efficiently and reliably.
And when it comes to Salesforce, bringing together the people responsible for building applications (developers & admins) and the people responsible for releasing, managing, and monitoring those applications (release managers, team leads, and admins) is very crucial to ensure accurate, faster, and seamless delivery.
But we also got to admit the fact that Salesforce has its own flaws when it comes to the development part. No wonder, all our favorite clouds are fantastic and lend themselves to customizations and small deployments without any hassle. But, if your Salesforce has an increasingly complex org, say 100+ users, and added a team of developers, things can get a bit messy, and deploying changes, artifacts, and much-needed customizations can consume a lot of time!
And that’s where you need to embrace DevOps best practices to boost collaboration among your admins, developers, release managers, test engineers, and key business stakeholders.
So, what is Salesforce DevOps Center?
“DevOps center is all about change and release management and introducing DevOps best practices to our entire community, regardless of where you fall on the low-code to pro-code spectrum” – Karen Fidelak, Sr Director for Product Management for DevOps Center at Salesforce.
Now that’s a pretty good explanation. To dig deeper, Salesforce DevOps Center brings the low-code/no-code (declarative) developers and the pro-code developers closer like never before. This will enable your team to work with a single set of configuration and code while applying DevOps best practices.
When we look back, the responsibility of releasing software or a change was not shared across the team, and it led to more silos and a lack of proper communication and effective collaboration between the teams.
Thanks to agile development! Today, we can release changes on the go and add improvements regularly rather than doing the release once at the end of a big project. And in all truth, DevOps automation has truly transformed the way software delivery works for enterprises.
Say toodle-oo to Change Sets
Salesforce DevOps Center is all about driving the best practices like source control, into the deployment approach. If you are a pro-code developer, you would’ve always been comfortable using CLIs and writing scripts for committing changes to a source control system like GitHub. You can now get the same in Salesforce DevOps Center, but all the complexity of GitHub will be hidden behind an easily understandable declarative UI.
If you look closer, DevOps Center is more like a significant upgrade from change sets, because anyone from your team can deploy changes using a top-notch point-and-click interface.
Salesforce DevOps Center – Under the hood!
Organize your work – Works Items, a new object designed for DevOps Center, will help you track the list of metadata items that are being changed. Not just tracking, you can also push the item to the pipeline stages right from development to production.
Track changes automatically – You know it before! If you can automatically track the changes you made in the dev environment, things will become super easy. In DevOps Center, you can view the list of changed metadata components, and choose the ones you want to migrate. But wait! Were you using sticky notes and spreadsheets to track changes before?
Integrate seamlessly with GitHub for Source Control – The whole point of DevOps center is easing out the complexity associated with GitHub. Even if you have never leveraged source control before, DevOps center will make it easy for you to adopt. So, just put a pause to all your whining, and just log in to GitHub with an assurance that DevOps Center has got your back.
Deploy changes with Clicks – DevOps for Salesforce can never get this simple! All you got to do is just visualize your deployment pipeline and simply click to deploy changes from one stage to the next.
A Solution that works for both “hybrid” and “fusion” teams!
This was said earlier! But still adding some light on “bringing together the low-code and pro-code developers” part!
To make it easy, presume that one of your team members is doing the work from CLI or VS Code, committing changes to the source control feature branch, and even creating, reviewing, and merging the pull request – as you see all outside DevOps Center!
Now, DevOps Center will pick up on all these actions and reflect them appropriately in the UI. And as obvious as it is, when another team member comes along later, they can look through the changes that were committed, access and review the pull request, and deploy the changes – all from inside of Salesforce DevOps Center.
And using clicks from DevOps Center, you can easily allow your low-code developers and admins to contribute to the project’s shared source of truth in the source control repository. No more pushing your users to adopt CLI or any other processes they despise or yield to the fact that changes that are being managed with Change Sets are no longer a part of your source control repository.
How to get your hands on it?
Accessing DevOps Center is as easy as hitting your setup and typing DevOps in the Quick Find box. And if you have a production org with Professional, Enterprise, or Unlimited edition, or a Developer edition org, you can go to the ‘DevOps Center’ page and install the feature.
Have any questions?
When DevOps Center was launched, our prospects were more curious to know what it will mean for them. The more seamless the process is for the developers, the faster, more secure, and more reliable the release cycle, implementations, and enhancements will be for our clients.
Want to boost and automate your Salesforce releases for enhanced business efficiency? We can do it for you. Time and again, we have joined hands with our in-house DevOps team and delivered seamless and smooth Salesforce releases to our clients across DEV, QA, UAT, and PROD, environments.
