If you think DevOps is only a concern for developers, you’re not seeing the full picture. Yes, DevOps tools and practices do help improve code quality and eliminate production bugs for developers, but they also help managers make more regular, reliable releases and give admins the ability to quickly compare Salesforce orgs and make changes.
DevOps Dreamin’ is a new conference hosted by Gearset that illuminates the topic of Salesforce DevOps, exploring it from a number of angles that clarify principles and processes for beginners and offer helpful tips for experts.
Last week, approximately 200 Salesforce professionals gathered on the 80th floor of Chicago’s Aon Center for the inaugural DevOps Dreamin’. Silverline was one of the three exhibitors at the conference, which also included Provar and Elements.cloud, and for many, it was their first conference since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
Connecting members of the Salesforce DevOps community
“This was in-person, but it was also a smaller, cozier event,” said Joanna Bak, Developer. “Compared to other Salesforce-styled events, it was only 200 people. You really were able to have good conversations with lots of people, including the speakers. Whoever was speaking, afterwards you can ask them questions directly. Folks who came up to the table had a little more time to talk, especially on the second day when everyone already got their swag.”
“It was really the right size,” said Gregory Grinberg, Director, Technology Team, a certified technical architect who’s been with Silverline for over 12 years. “This was my first post-COVID conference, so just getting to see people in person and have conversations and ad hoc meetings was really motivating and a useful experience overall.”
“We got direct access to the product managers and everyone else, basically as much as we needed it,” said Eric Nelson. “DevOps can often be a forgotten or overlooked thing, so seeing a community that is very passionate about it and knowing they’re out there is exciting.”
“DevOps is something that is standard and normal and has been around for a long time within other development spaces,” said Bak, “but it’s definitely a growing space in the Salesforce world because folks who come from other backgrounds are trying to implement it. This event helped create a space for folks who maybe have heard DevOps as a buzzword to actually learn how to do it well.”
To help members of the Salesforce community deepen their DevOps knowledge, Salesforce and Gearset have developed the DevOps Launchpad. This free training platform offers:
- Courses and articles on a wide range of Salesforce DevOps topics, from version control to backups to Git branching strategies
- Engaging quizzes to test your skills and increase retention
- Certifications and badges you can add to your resume and share with your network
As more and more organizations invest in DevOps, Salesforce DevOps skills are increasingly valuable in the job market. No matter your maturity level, DevOps Launchpad has resources to help you become an invaluable asset for teams.
“There are a lot of folks who are investing and interested in DevOps,” said Bak. “They’re looking for an effective way of getting ideas across and following processes and really trying to understand best practices and knowledge shared in this space.”
How technology is shaping the future of DevOps
“DevOps was not on as many teams’ radar even just a few years ago,” said Grinberg. “But now it’s something that they want to use and something that they consider an expectation for how you do Salesforce deployments.” Data backups were a particularly hot topic at the conference, which featured a panel on how to restore your org and rescue data in the event of a data loss incident.
“Data backup and recovery is becoming a bigger and bigger part of DevOps,” said Grinberg. “It hasn’t traditionally been the responsibility of the Salesforce team, but it is now becoming that. The impact of not having it is growing, and so this is something that needs to be incorporated into teams’ DevOps processes.” Designed specifically to handle the unique complexity of Salesforce environments, Gearset safely backs up all of your data and metadata while preserving any parent-child relationships.
The conference spotlighted new Gearset features offering visual representations of page layouts and pipelines. For page layouts, they are working on giving companies a visual representation of where they can put different fields and sections, and select which of those pieces they actually want to move.
Similarly, Gearset is also providing visual representations of the different pipelines set up across separate orgs, rather than relying on lists. If you want to move your Dev sandbox to your QA sandbox to your UAT sandbox, you’ll be able to see how it all deploys and what the chain looks like.
This bridges the gap between the very technical experts, the people who are most familiar with all the metadata, and those who are more administration focused, the people who understand what they need to have on their Salesforce page.
“Some of the smaller companies that I talked to thought that they just weren’t big enough to need something like that,” said Dan Watkoski, Client Services Business Analyst. “But it isn’t just for larger companies or companies that are very technical or using code. It’s a process to make sure things are done correctly.”
Enhance your DevOps processes with Silverline
With the conference only feet away from Millennium Park, the Silverline team had to snap a pic at The Bean, the world’s most majestic legume. As a company with a primarily remote workforce, we value conferences as an opportunity to have employees meet in-person and bring teams closer together. We’re currently hiring for key roles, check out open positions here.
Looking to take advantage of DevOps technology? Our Salesforce DevOps services empower optimized, scalable, and reliable development operations, allowing organizations to minimize errors while adapting and innovating quickly in the long run. Find out how we can help your DevOps team.
