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CI/CD
Language
Articles
9/17/2024
10 minutes
Exploring DevOps for Different Types of Salesforce Clouds
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Operational challenges often hinder Salesforce developers and architects from maximizing productivity and fostering innovation. DevOps is a game changer that can solve this issue.
Building a DevOps culture is an investment that empowers your teams with the necessary tools and expertise to streamline development, accelerate release cycles, and deploy new features securely and efficiently, ensuring faster time-to-market for critical Salesforce capabilities.
This article explores the most impactful DevOps use cases and Salesforce deployment best practices centred around DevOps.
DevOps is a culture shift that combines software development (Dev) and operations (Ops). The DevOps market is expected to reach $66 billion by 2033, growing at a CAGR of 20.5% between 2023 and 2032.
Salesforce development is undergoing a major transition led by the emergent DevOps practices in the field. By adopting DevOps into Salesforce development, teams standardize development processes to make them more consistent and predictable, reducing the complexity that comes with bespoke Salesforce settings. This opens the door to enhancements in building new features or applying changes, for example, via user story-driven development.
Salesforce includes 15 types of specialized clouds, each targeting a unique aspect of business operations. Let’s take a look into the most common offerings to help you understand the value of DevOps for each of them.
Salesforce Sales Cloud helps teams streamline and improve their sales processes using tools for managing leads, tracking sales possibilities, and successfully closing deals. The cloud service includes lead and opportunity management, account and contact management, sales forecasting, and workflow automation options.
Sales Cloud is especially valuable for companies looking to streamline their sales process, increase team efficiency, and better understand their sales performance through Salesforce business process automation.
Salesforce Service Cloud is all about improving customer service operations. It provides features to help customer care teams perform efficient and personalized customer support, including:
Service Cloud is especially valuable for firms that want to improve customer assistance, increase customer happiness, and streamline service operations.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud offers comprehensive digital marketing capabilities, from building personalized client journeys to managing multi-channel marketing activities across features such as:
Marketing Cloud helps companies boost digital marketing efforts, tailor customer experiences, and track campaign impact.
Salesforce Commerce Cloud provides e-commerce solutions that help teams build personalized shopping experiences and efficiently manage online sales activities. The service has intelligent product recommendations, inventory and order management features, mobile optimization, and customer insights and analytics.
It’s a good solution for companies looking to improve their e-commerce presence, manage online sales more effectively, and provide tailored customer experiences.
Salesforce Experience Cloud (formerly Community Cloud) focuses on creating custom digital experiences, letting companies interact with customers, partners, and employees in a dynamic online community setting. The solution helps businesses create branded online communities, increase engagement, and provide tailored digital experiences.
Salesforce Health Cloud is designed specifically for the healthcare sector. It offers patient management, care coordination, and targeted patient interaction capabilities. The solution lets healthcare providers deliver more tailored and efficient care by providing a comprehensive view of each patient and allowing communication among care teams.
Salesforce Financial Services Cloud was specifically developed for the financial services industry. It provides tailored CRM solutions for wealth management, banking, insurance, and other financial services.
It helps financial institutions manage client relationships more effectively and deliver personalized recommendations. Giving a 360-degree perspective of clients and optimizing processes, the solution enables financial professionals to provide more personalized and efficient services.
Salesforce development teams often operate in complex infrastructures comprising cloud-based microservice and containerized environments. DevOps manages these infrastructures while preserving reliability and scalability, helping teams deploy applications faster and with confidence.
Adapting DevOps practices to Salesforce Cloud improves the efficiency of developing and deploying Salesforce applications while maintaining the platform's customizability and flexibility.
For example, automating CI/CD for Salesforce streamlines the deployment process, allowing Salesforce developers to push changes seamlessly from sandbox to production.
Version control is crucial for managing Salesforce metadata and tracking changes across environments. It ensures teams can collaborate effectively and roll back changes if necessary.
Teams can resolve compliance issues using a version control system that provides a single source of truth for all active source code and a tracked history of who changed what and when, making auditing more straightforward.
In addition to code reviews and unit testing, teams can run automated security and compliance testing with the build. By adding pipeline compliance, you can ensure that any modifications that make it through to release meet your security standards.
Implementing automation in deployment and testing allows your team to focus on driving performance. A DevOps solution created within the Salesforce ecosystem provides seamless integration, improved security, and total insight into the release management process, which is impossible with non-native Salesforce apps.
The benefits of DevOps cover various areas of the development process. Most importantly, DevOps shortens the Salesforce release cycle thanks to automation and CI/CD methods that accelerate the delivery of new features and upgrades, resulting in faster business value realization. By automating duplicate operations such as testing and deployment, developers can deliver Salesforce upgrades and new features more quickly and reliably.
Integrating DevOps with Salesforce improves visibility and accountability in the development process. Such methods can provide real-time updates on the status of development, testing, and deployment stages to keep the team on the same page, improving communication and collaboration.
DevOps lets teams benefit from the scalability of cloud solutions by automating complex or ever-changing systems. Infrastructure as code is an excellent example since it allows you to manage development, testing, and production environments efficiently.
Good CI/CD pipeline management simplifies processes, reduces errors, and enhances teamwork. Version control is at the center of that – versioning lets teams track changes, roll back to previous versions if needed, troubleshoot issues efficiently and improve pipeline reliability. Version control helps low-code developers manage Salesforce metadata, which comes with several challenges around metadata dependency or the sheer number of metadata types and settings.
A DevOps pipeline lets you merge code in a central repository, set up configuration and infrastructure management, implement version control, and automate testing. All in all, a pipeline helps to maintain high code quality and facilitates team collaboration.
Performance monitoring is a crucial aspect of DevOps for Salesforce. It helps to identify and resolve performance bottlenecks by examining login times, API usage, and other performance-related events.
Salesforce is at the heart of business operations, handling a substantial percentage of internal and customer data while offering robust data analytics and development tools. That’s why ensuring that your Salesforce instance is compliant and secure is critical.
DevSecOps is an advancement of DevOps that incorporates security into the workflow, providing practical tips for incorporating compliance into your Salesforce DevOps process.
Almost 90% of Harvard Business Review survey respondents deemed DevOps essential. As Salesforce DevOps evolves, architects must stay current to innovate and streamline their processes. Emerging low-code platforms will speed up development and maintain quality. They will let architects and developers construct apps without hand-coding, speeding up iteration and release.
Naturally, AI is also part of Salesforce DevOp's future. AI is being integrated into test automation processes, altering how developers check their code, especially in low-code solutions. AI-powered testing solutions that leverage Salesforce autonomous agents, such as Copado’s Robotic Testing, enable architects to test more accurately with intelligent test case development, anomaly detection, and predictive analysis.
DevOps is critical for developing Salesforce business applications. Copado integrates DevOps best practices into the Salesforce ecosystem for faster, more efficient, and reliable deployments, helping companies to fully benefit from Salesforce's capabilities.
Level up your Salesforce DevOps skills with our resource library.
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