DevOps Center - Practical Use Cases
Notes from the Trailblazer DX 2022 conference.
DevOps Center Overview
- In closed beta right now
- Are real people using t, but it’s in a closed beta
- Plan is to launch by EOY
- SFDC has been releasing a number of tools that will support the pro-developer users in their desire to bring their SFDC DevOps up to par with other external systems
- DevOps Center is about bringing this same experience to admins and those without developer chops
- Key pillars / goals of this project
- Better declarative experience: get rid of Change Sets
- Support Hybrid / Fusion Teams: supporting declarative and programmatic developers and all business functions
- Democratize DevOps
- Platform Extensibility
- Should be the ultimate release management platform for the entire Salesforce ecosystem
- Main Features
- Track changes with UI as development happens
- Work Item: tracking all changes related to a specific unit of work
- Integrate with version control
- Source control is required to use DevOps Center!
- Move changes between environments with clicks
- Work with hybrid teams
- Track changes with UI as development happens
- Will be a free and included part of the Salesforce platform on PE and above
- Supports org-based development model
- Doesn’t really support scratch orgs or package-based development model right now, but later
Customer Perspective: Marcus & Millichap
- Features that have been very beneficial
- Customizable and multiple pipelines for codifying different types of deployments
- Bundling support
- Sometimes it make sense to deploy work all at once; you can bundle it all together without multiple change sets
- Being able to see changes made to an org, select from things changed, and then include in your deployment
- Fully replacing change sets
- Everything stored in source control by default
- Separation of Roles for team accountability or compliance requirements
Elements.cloud DevOps Center Extensions
- Elements.cloud
- All about making sure that you’re building the right thing before you start building
- Extends the concept of a Work Item, helps to gather and view all related context to a specific Work Item
- Includes additional insight into where specific metadata items are currently used throughout Salesforce and related platforms
- Also integrates with JIRA
- Building extensions for DevOps Center can be very easy, likely requires a package and a Chrome Extension
John’s Additional Thoughts
- Would be a really good thing to potentially try and lump into the Outsourced Admin product line
- Most of our customers on T&M want to move too quickly and don’t have rigorous change management in place. For those that do, using DevOps center could bring some solid clarity or predicability to deployments
- Potentially DevOps Center + Elements.cloud would be a good fit for a couple of our larger clients
- One intangible benefit of DevOps Center + Elements.cloud is that we can show easily dependencies and justify longer time for certain changes