With the fast-moving world of technology, the Salesforce environment is also evolving towards deeper customization with complex functionalities. Salesforce developers and project managers have been looking for a tool like DevOps Center for a long time to remove the manual pain of change sets which helps them handle the release management and to move the code changes within the organizations more effectively.
Salesforce DevOps Center is now available and ready to replace change sets – declarative deployment. DevOps Center is a tool that will provide an improved experience around change and release management. It helps move changes between Salesforce development environments and automatically tracks the source control repositories which helps move changes through the release pipelines. This executes development work inside or outside of the Salesforce DevOps Center using tools of our choice and gives us greater visibility into changes.
Features for Release Management Planning
DevOps Center helps manage the release to keep the project on track with some cool features, let’s check a few of them:
- Organize Work Items: Helps to increase visibility regarding where changes reside in each pipeline stage
- Handles Conflict: It identifies conflict in the work items in the pipeline which helps resolve the conflict fast
- Sync Environments: Helps to collaborate with different Development Organizations, which enables synchronization to avoid future conflicts
- History Tracking: It increases transparency for more visibility and error tracking in both work item and pipeline views
- Validation: Runs a validation-only deployment to keep it in sync and maintain it hassle-free
DevOps in the future will help us design deployments for third-party tools like Mulesoft, Heroku, and other compatible platforms.
How to start with DevOps Center in Salesforce
Installing the Salesforce DevOps Center package is very easy. Under Setup search for DevOps Center and install the package with the Salesforce help doc.
Create a New Connected App and assign permission sets from the package to the users.
Authenticate and connect Salesforce with the GitHub repository by creating a Project in DevOps Application in Salesforce.
Design and create a pipeline to manage the sandboxes and connect it with Production for seamless deployment. The pipeline has a series of stages – each stage related to a Salesforce org.
Work Items flow through the pipeline and are created by pulling and selecting the list of all metadata changes which are needed for the project. It is extremely accurate and more efficient than manual change sets and metadata pulls.
Salesforce DevOps Center Architecture
The Salesforce DevOps Center Architecture has been designed to be flexible and scalable to accommodate changes in business requirements and technology advancements. It is designed to promote collaboration and communication between development and operations teams to ensure seamless integration in the processes.
Salesforce DevOps Center can enhance the productivity with below components:
- Code Repository: This is a centralized location where the code is stored and managed. This can be a version control system such as Git or SVN
- Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) Pipeline: This is a series of automated processes that enable the continuous integration and deployment of code changes to a production environment
- Monitoring and Logging: Tools such as Nagios, Splunk, or Logstash are used to monitor the performance and health of applications and infrastructure
- Automated Testing: Automated testing tools such as Selenium, JUnit, or TestNG are used to test code changes before they are deployed to production
- Virtualized Infrastructure: Virtualized infrastructure, such as VMware or OpenStack, provides the infrastructure required to run applications in a DevOps environment
What’s next?
Salesforce DevOps Center is now available for everyone under setup. It’s a revolutionary tool introduced to help the development phase with more stability and make your deployment process faster and easier. From an organization’s perspective, it is cost-effective and opens up more prospects for complex development and deployment projects.
Salesforce offers a lot of information and resources to learn more about DevOps Center which helps migrate from change sets to make your deployment smooth.
