DevOps combines two functions typically treated separately: development and operations. DevOps helps organizations with standardized development methodology, clear communication, and documented processes supported by a standards-based, proven middleware platform to improve application development, bring agility, and provide greater availability and security to your IT infrastructure.  

So why adopt DevOps?

Organizations must deliver and operate software quickly and reliably to meet the demands of an ever-changing industry. The faster your teams can make changes to software, the sooner you can deliver value to your customers, run experiments, and receive valuable feedback. 

Google has developed and validated four metrics that measure software delivery performance.

The four metrics of software delivery performance can be considered in terms of throughput and stability. You can measure throughput using the lead time of code changes (time from code commit to releasing in production) and deployment frequency. Measure stability using the time to restore service after an incident and change the failure rate.

DevOps – Where development meets operations

The application life cycle comprises five phases: development, testing, integration, deployment, and monitoring. These repeat in an infinite loop when we start working on any project. 

Using DevOps, we can bring the development and operations team together for a faster, more accurate, and more responsive software delivery experience. If you have ever worked on deployment to user stories or a project, you understand the pain; it becomes critical if you use change sets and move packages through the pipeline. It’s a pain for the IT team; hence using DevOps makes everyone’s life easier.

Benefits of DevOps

DevOps has a proven track to increasing software delivery speed, efficiency, and quality. Let’s get clarity on how DevOps can benefit you and your. 

1. Ensure Daster Deployment
2. System Stability & Reliability
3. Scalability
4. Security
5. Higher Customer Satisfaction

The best DevOps tools for Salesforce in 2022

It’s important to note that there can be overlaps between the functionality of these DevOps tools. Sometimes, you can perform the same action with different tools and use them in several competing combinations in your DevOps stack.

Copado

Copado is the #1 DevOps and Testing Platform for Salesforce and the cloud. The most powerful tool to leverage the only quality-driven + low-code DevOps solution for multi-cloud enterprises to accelerate end-to-end digital transformation and unlock CI/CD.

As the fastest low-code testing platform for Salesforce, Copado seamlessly integrates, automates, and orchestrates the end-to-end Salesforce DevOps cycle.

1. Roll out richer features and functionality for customers consistently.
2. Prototype and develop capabilities in real-time to ramp up user adoption and respond to crises quickly.
3. Accelerate software delivery to increase employee efficiency and satisfaction.

Benefits of Copado: 

1. Low-code Orchestration
2. Extensible Multi-Cloud Solution
3. Native Testing in the CI/CD Pipeline
4. Native Version Control
5. Advanced Branching Strategy
6. Identify & Resolve Conflicts
7. Forward & Back Promotion
8. One Click Rollback

Jenkins

Jenkins is an open-source, server-based automation platform that helps DevOps teams automate tasks in building, facilitating CI/CD, testing, and deploying any project or software. It is written in Java, can run out-of-the-box, and offers packages for Linux, Windows, macOS, and other Unix-like OSs.    

Benefits of Jenkins: 

• Jenkins supports 100+ plugins to integrate with almost every tool available in the CI/CD toolchain, such as Git, Amazon EC2, Maven, etc.
• You can set and configure Jenkins easily using its simple web interface with built-in error checks and helps.
• Jenkins is super extensible through plugins so that you can perform a range of additional functionalities.
• Since it’s extensible, Jenkins can easily be used as a CI/CD tool for any software development project.
• As it’s a Java-based DevOps tool, you can efficiently distribute it across machines to accelerate builds, tests, and deployments.

CircleCI

No matter your DevOps team size, this cloud-native CI/CD tool CircleCI offers reliability and speed for your software development process. You can develop and deploy high-performing software on your infrastructure or in the cloud at scale quickly.

Benefits of CircleCI

• CircleCI runs your CI/CD pipeline automatically in a virtual machine or clean container to facilitate easy tests.
• In case of pipeline failures, it notifies your team immediately. You can also automate notifications using their Slack integration.
• Performs automated deployment of codes to a different environment to enable quick time-to-market.
• It integrates with Bitbucket and GitHub to create pipelines for your code commitments.
• Allows you to orchestrate and define task execution for better workflow control.
• Provides a powerful insights dashboard to track status and duration and optimize your pipelines.

Prodly – Next-Gen DevOps & Sandbox Seeding for Salesforce

With Prodly AppOps Release, Salesforce admins and operations teams can eliminate a release’s most time-consuming and error-prone elements by automating data deployment using an upsert operation and virtual external IDs for maximum accuracy and efficiency. The solution provides a single source of truth for data, allowing admins to track every change, compare changes, and resolve conflicts if multiple users are working on the same data and will even deactivate and reactivate workflow and validation rules to prevent deployment errors.

Benefits of Prodly

1. Sandbox Management
   1. Turn every org into a rich testing environment to catch bugs early on
   2. 1-click scratch org setup
   3. Seed up to 5 sandboxes in 1 go
   4. Cross org record ID mapping
2. Work Management
   1. Organize work into user stories for clear requirements and tracking
   2. Easily understand capacity and backlog
   3. Identify with a glance what work is approved and ready to deploy
3. Release management
   1. Source-driven development to release small changes more frequently
   2. Deploy data and metadata at once
   3. Automatic duplicate resolution & dependency management
   4. Temporary automation deactivation
   5. Integrate to VCS (Github, Bitbucket, Azure)
   6. Prebuilt automation for major Salesforce Clouds & apps
4. Compliance
   1. Detailed audit history of every change, incl. approvals
   2. Control who can deploy to production
   3. 1-click compliance reporting
   4. Data masking

Salesforce DevOps Center

Salesforce DevOps Center is a DevOps release management tool from Salesforce. It will replace change sets in the coming future. In DevOps Center, you can create projects and create user stories associated with work items to track your changes within that project. DevOps Center is a new way to manage and release Salesforce changes — without Change Sets. It will organize your work, track changes, integrate with GitHub for source control, and finally deploy changes with clicks. Read my other blog to learn how to enable and install Salesforce DevOps Center.

Benefits of DevOps Center

• Organize your work
• Track changes
• Integrate with GitHub for source control
• Deploy changes with clicks