Salesforce DevOps Implementation and What You Need to Know About It

When it comes to defining DevOps, it can be considered as a set of practices that combines operations and software development to help the teams. DevOps enable the building of applications and test and release the same faster with more reliability. Considering IT and operations teams, DevOps may bring together the people responsible for building applications with the people responsible for monitoring, release, and maintain the applications.

DevOps has an end goal to completely blur the lines between these different roles by working closely with the shared pattern tools and practices. In this article, we will discuss how each teamwork within the Salesforce ecosystem benefits from the same.

Even though it is relatively new to Salesforce, DevOps has been established for a long as an ideal way to charter and manage software on different platforms and software stacks. So, it is not something new, but it is a longstanding approach with well-documented advantages in faster development and frequent deployments.

Teams across different industries had adopted DevOps as it helps them to deploy more reliably and frequently. Above all, DevOps can lead to much shorter and more solid development and release cycles, ultimately saving a huge amount of time and money.

From release management to the DevOps

On cloud-based platforms, Salesforce is meant to make it easy for the users to add new capabilities and customization of the Orgs without being worried about network infrastructure, storage containers, or security access. Many of these can be traditionally considered the operations responsibility, which Salesforce developers themselves can easily handle. Considering the Salesforce administration, developers may quickly think about their process regarding release management and changes with new features being deployed from sandboxes or directly added into the production Org.

Over the last decade, Salesforce teams had been taken out of the trend set by the development teams on different platforms and started to adopt many elements of development best practices from time to time. These are basically:

• Automating all possible parts for the development process.
• Taking incremental and iterative approaches to application development
• Using the tools like GIT-based version control, which are widely used within other software etc.

While managing operations and development, they are also trying to empower the admins and developers to make things easier for everyone and help them contribute towards the development and spin up releases. At the same time, they are also trying to remove the organizational silos and streamline ongoing workflows quickly to benefit the end uses. A good salesforce DevOps training approach will also help to make this easier.

Advantages of DevOps

The major purpose of DevOps implementation is to increase the ability of teams to deliver better features and solve critical issues as quickly as possible with more confidence. So, there is no surprise that the high-performing teams who use DevOps are now the ones who make the most achievements.  

Another major advantage is a higher frequency of releases into production. It only takes a shorter time to make changes and developing better features to be deployed. It is also notable that there are only fewer service disruptions due to poor quality code. Along with these, the DevOps approach will ensure faster restoration times in a service outage.

An industry survey conducted by Google back in 2019 showed high performing teams tend to deploy about 200 times more frequently and make the changes about 100 times much faster than the low-performing teams. High-performance DevOps teams also reported change failure rates of 0-15 %, whereas the others reported the same as 60% or higher. The high performers can also restore the services in less than an hour when there is an outage, whereas slow performance is restored the same between one week to one month by restricting all their processes.

What DevOps deals mostly with the custom set of tools it offers and the style of working rather than being a technology stack. This may not necessarily mean you have to make a lot of changes in the way your team currently works or to make a large number of changes all at once. Most of these works, which the advanced Salesforce teams are already doing, fall under the DevOps strategy. This being said, the conventional Salesforce teams, too, who move towards a faster and more automated development approach may be incorporating many key aspects of DevOps.

Version control for a quicker and more reliable development

Version control system or source control is usually at the heart of any modern DevOps process, which makes it possible for multiple contributors to work on the same features during the same time by incorporating all changes.

There are many reasons and advantages to using a version control system. Here are the notable ones.

• Version control will help reduce the risk and avoid costly mistakes by using metadata as the source of truth for the organizations instead of production org.
• It can track and note the development work with a complete history of all your team’s changes to help audit and debug.
• Track collaboratively with different team members to work on the same project without overwriting other’s work.
• Release reliability and safety by testing the changes until you are satisfied to go ahead with it.

CI/CD for rapid deployment without any manual interruption

Continuous integration is built on a workflow and can help automate testing and validating the changes.Continuous delivery is all about frequent releases where small changes to the users can be automated to help reduce the risks associating with it. In the case of big releases, CI/CD will take the pain and risk of deploying a change manually to multiple developments onto production. This also promotes an iterative approach to develop to contribute to small changes and get immediate feedback from your team. Using the CI/CD method to make regular small automated releases will help you to reduce any manual errors caused.

With all these aspects working in favor of Salesforce DevOps, you can confidently adopt this set of tools and processes to streamline your ongoing development and continuous delivery processes for better returns.