Salesforce DevOps Center Launches with High Expectations

This is a podcast presentation of an article published earlier this week. https://salesforcedevops.net/index.php/2022/12/19/salesforce-devops-center-launches-with-high-expectations/ Salesforce last week finally announced General Availability of DevOps Center, a new Salesforce feature designed to ease application development and release management. DevOps Center was originally introduced under “safe harbor” in late 2019, so this announcement culminates one of the most anticipated releases of a Salesforce feature in the last few years. “DevOps Center is one of our most-requested and most-anticipated solutions ever because it increases efficiency and productivity – and it makes work easier and more accurate for thousands of development teams. It’s now easier than ever to manage changes, collaborate with team members, and ensure you have a synchronized source. And, it’s designed for fusion teams made up of developers across the low-code and pro-code continuum, so you can work inside or outside the DevOps Center UI-based app and everything remains in sync,” said Karen Fidelak, a senior director of product management at Salesforce, in a press release. Table Of Contents What is Salesforce DevOps Center? Using DevOps Center Who Needs Salesforce DevOps Center? Salesforce DevOps Center Architecture Salesforce DevOps Center Industry Impact Additional Industry Reactions More Coherent Salesforce Developer Tools for Trailblazers Trailblazers Move Ahead with DevOps Center DevOps Center Moves Salesforce Devops Forward What is Salesforce DevOps Center? DevOps Center is a new Salesforce feature that lets admins, low code developers, and application developers safely and easily deploy changes to a production org. To do its work, DevOps Center relies heavily on the Salesforce org source tracking features found in scratch orgs and some sandbox types. This lets DevOps Center automatically determine meta data changes in development orgs, update GIT repositories, and then deploy change artifacts to testing and production orgs in a managed devops pipeline. Ben McCarthy, the founder of SalesforceBen.com, was asked what DevOps Center means for the Trailblazer community. “The Salesforce DevOps Center is an exciting product release for the ecosystem. It will not only change the way Salesforce professionals deploy changes, by bringing out a successor to change sets, but a new mindset, to meet modern DevOps best practices. This is exciting for both the businesses that use Salesforce, as they can accelerate development in a safer way, and the Salesforce professionals that will add another skillset to their repertoire,” said Mr. McCarthy in email correspondence. Pablo Gonzalez, a Salesforce architect who writes about CI/CD and the Salesforce API at pablogonzalez.io, was blunt about how he thinks DevOps Center is about to make some waves in the Trailblazer community. “The release of DevOps Center forces everyone to think about DevOps. Before its release, we could still hide behind the comfort zone of change sets. Now, Salesforce is sending a strong signal: Git-based deployments and pipelines are the way to deploy changes across your Salesforce orgs,” said Mr. Gonzalez in email correspondence. As everyone says, the biggest expectation of DevOps Center is to reduce or eliminate the use of change sets to deploy sandbox changes back to a production org. Based on my personal experience, DevOps Center has achieved that important goal.