The 5 Pillars of Salesforce DevOps

Salesforce DevOps is a software development process that combines the principles of Agile, continuous integration, and continuous delivery to streamline the delivery of high-quality applications. In this article, we will explore the 5 pillars of a successful Salesforce DevOps process and how to implement them in your organisation.

DevOps is crucial to the development life cycle, it allows your team to move faster and safer while empowering them to recover from a bad release or data loss quickly and effectively. Salesforce DevOps is unique in that it requires knowledge of the SFDC domain and sfdx tools besides the regular DevOps knowledge, which makes finding the right tool or creating one from scratch, quite the challenge. That's why we created Serpent, it increases your agility, shortens release cycles, and reduces deployments to minutes; empowering you to stay ahead of your competition!

Schedule a demo to find out more about how Serpent can supercharge your Salesforce DevOps Strategy today! Tekunda offers some excellent tools to help your DevOps teams, including built-in version control, continuous deployment systems, merge tools, and tons of different testing tools.

What is Salesforce DevOps?

DevOps is the combination of practices, and tools that increases an organisation's ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity. Evolving and improving products at a faster pace than organisations using manual software development and infrastructure management processes.

DevOps optimises your team collaboration as you build and deploy Salesforce apps, integrate with version control, automate workflows, and release with confidence using CI tools and the Metadata API. We will highlight how Tekunda uncomplicates and streamlines these practices.

How is Salesforce DevOps different?

Salesforce developers can choose from wide variety of environments to work in; scratch orgs, developer orgs, sandboxes, partial and full copy sandboxes, and of course production where all your important customer data lives.

You also have the choice between multiple ways to package a release depending upon the project's needs and its target audience. You could use changesets, managed packages, unmanaged packages, unlocked packages, metadata deployment, or Salesforce DX to load a new application into an organisation.

These are just some of the ways that approaching DevOps from a Salesforce perspective can differ from DevOps practices with other programs. If all these different methods of managing and deploying your applications seems a little hectic, check out Serpent and eliminate that operational headache immediately!

Why is DevOps Important?

It gives you the most important edge in technology, agility! It allows you to source control, build, deploy, release much more faster and manage changes more efficiently. It empowers your software team to manage the whole process end to end with minimal code effort resulting in a much more simplified development process between the team.

DevOps comes with the great value of eliminating the traditional and manual grunt tasks which are complicated and really time consuming. It does so by introducing a lot of automated processes like running automation, integration, and unit tests, deploying to the right environment without intervention and many more. This results in faster releases with lower risks empowering you to achieve your ROI even faster.

 

Pillars of a Successful Salesforce DevOps

Pillar 1: Version Control

Version control refers to the tracking of changes and keeping records of previous versions of an application’s code, metadata, and releases. Developing with version control is pivotal in any environment because you need to be able to revert changes at a moment’s notice. If a new change breaks production due to unforeseen bug(s), then you need to be able to restore to your previous stable version of the application at a moment’s notice minimising operational downtime.

Version control also enables seamless team collaboration, since oftentimes there is not just one member working on an application. When multiple developers make changes to the code, any changes need to be separately tracked and accessible and visible to the whole group or risk having them clash in overlap. It’s for this alone that version control is singularly considered to be the most important component of any DevOps setup.

Pillar 2: Release Management

It's important to have proper process to handle of your release cycle! Going directly from development to production could cost you everything and endless loop of unstable software, and that’s where release management comes in. Release management focuses on handing over the software from the development phase to the go-live phase for the users to use. In order to finally go-live, the software undergoes through a series of tests to ensure that the software is working as it should be. Release management is responsible for providing the needed environments for performing these random regression tests allowing you to apply any needed fixes until the rollout occurs.

Pillar 3: Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery

CI/CD for short falls under the umbrella of release management. From automatically running unit tests on newly opened pull requests verifying that everything still works as expected, to automating deployment to the right environment when new code is merged. CI/CD is the glue that guaranties your whole DevOps flows smoothly from one step to the next without wasting developers time, allowing them to do what they do best, develop!

Pillar 4: Speed

Do you prefer to work fast or precisely? What if both can be achieved together while lowering the risks! DevOps strategy allows you to mitigate the risks of making a fault change spread out across different organisations instantly and affecting the end-user. In addition it gives the option to always have a rollback strategy of your development changes while having a proper backup.

DevOps ensure that engineering teams are implementing their work without the fear of dependability and breaking stuff, definitely nobody wants to redo work, and by implementing smart DevOps solutions you eliminate that factor, and continuously focus on your next big releases to your clients.

Pillar 5: Collaboration

With version control, multiple team members can work on the same application simultaneously eliminating the factor of dependencies. Version control facilitates coordination, sharing, and collaboration across the entire software development team by enabling teams to work in distributed and asynchronous environments. It allows you to manage changes and maintain different versions of your code and artifacts, and resolve merge conflicts and related anomalies which will speed up your Salesforce Apps time to production.

Your All-in-one DevOps Solution. Powerful. Secure. Fast. Easy to use.

Serpent was built specifically for the Salesforce development and release cycles. It allows users to seamlessly orchestrate changes across their development ecosystem, eliminating pain points experienced when using traditional dev tools. Serpent handles the full development-release lifecycle including running unit tests, merging components, version control, continuous integrations, continuous deployments, code analysis, roll-back and backups.