Keenan Vision Podcast - Produced by SalesforceDevops.net Vernon Keenan

This edition of the Keenan Vision Podcast I interview Nicolas Vuillamy, a CTO at Cloudity, who is a Salesforce system integrator and custom application developer based in Europe. We talk about his open source project sfdx-hardis (documentation, Github).

Nicolas and his team got a little frustrated with the devops sprawl and other management issues when it came to working with SFDX-CLI pipelines. To make it all work better they created sfdx-hardis, which is a layer on top of SFDX-CLI which encapsulates a lot of common commands.

In this interview we go over the motivation for sfdx-hardis for a bit, then we dive into a demo of its capabilities.

Be sure to check out how sfdx-hardis works by interacting with VS Code to interactively get parameters needed to run a CI/CD pipeline.

I hope you enjoyed this edition of the Keenan Vision podcast. Be sure LIKE and SUBSCRIBE. And leave a comment to let us know how we are doing!

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.

This week on the Keenan Vision Podcast we delve into Provar Manager with Sam Arroyo, Provar product manager. In this tour we go through what is Provar Manager and get a demo.


What is Provar and Provar Manager?
The Provar Quality Hub

Enterprise hub for collating and understanding all kinds of testing inputs


Test Manager Demo

Test Plans
Application Lifecycle Management integration
Analytics and metrics
Salesforce DevOps Center integration
Elements.Cloud integration
Reports and Dashboards



About Provar
Provar pairs intuitive testing solutions, including Provar Automation and Provar Manager, with world-class service to help teams capitalize on their Salesforce investment. Its comprehensive Quality Cloud suite of testing products creates a  quality hub designed to improve release agility, drive down system defects, and advance innovation, meeting people at every stage in their journey — from the individual manual tester to comprehensive QA teams with automated workflows.

Visit www.provartesting.com to learn more.

We have more excellent Salesforce devops demos this week with another member of the SalesforceDevops.net Top Products Gallery, Prodly.

We are blessed to have David Clark, VP of Product over at Prodly to give us a tour of the product today.


Prodly Overview
Demo

Environments
Environment prep
Ancillary Metadata Management
Moving around ancillary metadata
Saving tons of time


Thank you everyone.

Prodly enables Salesforce teams to increase productivity by 80 percent while reducing risk up to 30 percent by putting next-gen DevOps into the hands of admins and citizen developers.

By reimagining the change management experience, Prodly delivers greater business agility, governance, and compliance without straining IT.

The company’s DevOps offering has rapidly expanded from a CPQ data deployment tool to include solutions for modern Salesforce DevOps, data migration, sandbox seeding, and SOX compliance.

Prodly sets the standard for low-code DevOps and can be implemented 20 times faster than traditional applications.

Prodly powers change management workflows for high-growth and Fortune 100 companies, including American Express, Expedia, Stanley Black & Decker, Cardinal Health, Nutanix, Johnson & Johnson, Splunk, Verizon, DoorDash, and Snowflake.

The company is privately held and based in Palo Alto, California with global operations.

For more information, visit prodly.co.

Welcome to the latest episode of the Keenan Vision podcast! This is part of our continuing series of hosting companies who made the SalesforceDevops.net Top Products list. This week we are graced with Dan Puttman who is showing us Salto. (dan.puttman@salto.io).

Salto translates your business applications’ configuration into text, allowing you to search, compare, test, deploy, and track changes across your environments. Dan shows us NaCl, the new application description language devised by Salto, and how it works throughout a Salesforce release management system.

Outline


What is and Why Salto?
Environments in Salto
Salto Impact Analysis – Change Intelligence
Demo of actual deployment
Free Tier! – Great for impact analysis

For more information please contact Salto at https://salto.io or email Dan at dan.puttman@salto.io.

Dreamforce Recap
Top Line – Definitely very successful


Trailblazers
Vendor Ecosystem
Overall energy and push

Genie


Opening keynote – as theatrical as ever. Brett Taylor took center stage to unveil Genie.
A re-packaging of Salesforce Marketing CDP, nee Datorama.

Adapters to each cloud


Analysis

Salesforce is being talked about as not being a growth company because they can’t compete in the “intelligent data layer.”
This move is strong because Salesforce is now the #1 enterprise application delivery platform, having recently eclipsed SAP in quarterly revenues. It has a chance of sparking interest and orders from an ever-increasing number of customers.
Tayor on CNBC on investor day: “Salesforce is a growth company.”
However, Genie just makes Salesforce a slightly better competitor when compared to Snowflake, Databricks, or Fivetran. Since acquisitions are apparently not off the table, according to Taylor, I expect Salesforce to make some more moves



Best Sessions


Pablo Gonzoles & Rob Cowell sessions were being talked about
How Google does Salesforce Devops is very interesting, very opinionated. Important session because it talked about some open-source innovations in environment variables and feature flags.
Sparsely attended session on how Salesforce does devops. Very fascinating under-the-covers look at service discovery, monitoring, and remediation. Showed off merlion, an open-source Python ML and anomaly-detection system called Merlion.

Ancillary Services Market for Salesforce is strong


Salesforce did not announce any competing products
Vendor villages were busy
System Integrations are dominant

Salesforce Devops Strong


Companies Exhibiting (14)

ACCELQ
Cloud Compliance
CodeScan/AutoRABIT
Copado
Elements Cloud
Flosum
Gearset
Metazoa
Odaseva
Opsera
OwnBackup
Prodly

DevOps Center Integration


Provar
Salto
With Secure

Platform Cybersecurity




DevOps Center not making much of a dent

Still in Beta; no info on usage or satisfaction yet
Prodly and Elements Cloud integrations



Journalistic Topics


Press Conference
The Press Room

Foreign Press


Trailblazers Love Salesforce

It seems real
People get a chance to become successful
There is a support network available


High Tech Bubble

Reddit thread


Customer attendee satisfaction

Reminder about local trailblazer events