Why Salesforce?

Over the past 20 years, Salesforce has become the fastest growing enterprise software platform, and a market leader in sales, service, marketing, integration and custom application development among other areas. Although there are many reasons why a company might adopt or consider using Salesforce, the overriding value proposition is that it provides tons of capabilities out of the box, releases new capabilities at an ambitious pace and allows for virtually endless customization and innovation.

Unlike with traditional platforms, there’s no need to manage infrastructure for computing, data, network or security, and no need to invest in generic system administration that adds no value for the organization. Add to this the accessible and supportive community and learning culture based around Salesforce’s Trailhead, which enables rapid onboarding and skill development, and it’s easy to see the attraction of this platform.

Salesforce’s mantra throughout the 2000’s was “Clicks not Code,” and their logo was the “No Software” image which became embodied as SaaSy, Salesforce’s first mascot. You could be a declarative developer using clicks alone and build a data model, business process automation and user interface using drag-and-drop interfaces. This opened the door to an entire new job specialization: Salesforce admins and app builders—citizen developers who were empowered to directly customize the platform to meet their company’s needs.

As Salesforce grew, they recognized the need to enable custom coding on their platform and launched Apex Triggers, followed by Apex Classes and Visualforce in 2008. Admins continued to configure rich business capabilities, while low-code developers and professional developers were empowered to create customizations beyond the scope of what could be built declaratively. Initially, the code developed on Salesforce was rudimentary: a few hundred lines here and there to accommodate unusual calculations and data processing. But gradually, companies began to accumulate tens of thousands of lines of custom code, especially as legacy applications were migrated from other systems. Needless to say, the “No Software” motto no longer strictly applies.

In the decade since the launch of Apex, 150,000 companies have adopted Salesforce and moved a staggering number of legacy systems onto Salesforce—which now processes billions of transactions per day. Many of these transactions are part of the core CRM and customer service applications, but a huge number relate to custom applications, making Salesforce one of the largest Platform as a Service (PaaS) providers.

How is DevOps Different for Salesforce?

As mentioned before, Salesforce provides both SaaS (Software as a Service) and a PaaS (Platform as a Service). By contrast, much of the focus elsewhere in the DevOps world is in moving from on-premise infrastructure to using IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service). This diagram shows an illustration of the differences between these four modes, and how they represent progressive simplifications of what companies themselves have to manage.

Managing the Salesforce development lifecycle requires a unique skill set and approach compared to most other platforms. You can say the DevOps movement was jointly realized by both developers (working in traditional languages such as Java) and system admins or operators (working on traditional infrastructure such as servers and databases). There are thus a vast range of well-established tools and techniques in the DevOps world for developing and deploying code, and for managing and updating infrastructure. Unfortunately, almost none of them can directly be used for Salesforce.

To illustrate this, let’s look at how teams would manage infrastructure using AWS, or deploy an application onto Heroku (a PaaS product also owned by Salesforce). Every aspect of AWS infrastructure can be represented using JSON configuration. JSON can be used to define which AWS services are used, which data centers they are running in and how they’re configured. The AWS CLI (command-line interface) can be used in a continuous integration tool such as GitLab CI to automatically deploy updates to AWS infrastructure every time the JSON configuration changes.

Similarly, Heroku provides a platform to deploy custom application code (in Java, PHP, Ruby, etc.) and to specify which services (such as Postgres databases) are needed to support that application. The Heroku CLI can be used to automatically update the application whenever the codebase changes. Heroku also provides a tool called Pipelines that allows you to visualize and manage the entire development lifecycle without requiring a third party CI tool.

AWS’s infrastructure as code approach is a delight for sysadmins, since it allows them to track changes and automate updates. Similarly, Heroku removes the vast majority of the setup and dependencies that developers would need to deploy their applications. Heroku provides a true PaaS that is ready to receive custom-coded applications built in a traditional way: from the ground up.

Although we can say Salesforce’s Lightning Platform is a PaaS, it actually works extremely different from true PaaS systems such as Heroku. The Lightning Platform allows you to write custom server-side or client-side code, but that code can only run on Salesforce. Although it allows you to define custom database tables and fields, that schema cannot be loaded into any database other than Salesforce’s. These customizations are effectively just changes to the configuration of one Salesforce instance. It’s therefore more accurate to say every customization you can make to Salesforce is basically a Salesforce configuration change.

Salesforce is actually just a big application that happens to allow for infinite customization. But this means the tools used for managing other IaaS and PaaS products cannot be used to customize Salesforce. Fortunately however, the release of Salesforce DX means the techniques and principles used with other technologies can now be ported over to Salesforce. That is the focus of the book Mastering Salesforce DevOps that I’ve recently released.

DevOps in the Salesforce World

Moving from on-premises CRM software to Salesforce removes the need for servers and manual software upgrades. Consolidating customer support and online community management onto the CRM platform removes the need to integrate sales, support and community applications. Migrating legacy applications onto the Salesforce platform allows those applications to share data and processes with the rest of the business.

Because moving to the cloud dramatically simplifies many of the challenges in delivering IT functionality, many Salesforce customers have been able to innovate quickly without having DevOps practices in place. But even without the hassle of managing servers and building software from scratch, the inevitable growth of complexity eventually causes companies to struggle with issues such as organizations getting out of sync and delays in deploying functionality.

Salesforce solves so many IT headaches, it’s almost easy to overlook the fact that it’s created some new ones.

Salesforce has unleashed the ability for companies to focus on their core competencies, instead of struggling to provide basic IT services. Salesforce admins and developers are empowered to spend their time directly creating business value. But with multiple Salesforce admins and developers working at companies year after year, more and more Salesforce customers are finding themselves drowning in all of that business value.

If you have tens of thousands of components, each providing business value, but no systematic way of tracking, managing or deploying them, you now have a new form of business pain and chaos. Far too much of a good thing.

What is Salesforce DX?

Salesforce DX (Development eXperience) is an initiative begun by Salesforce in 2016 and launched publicly at Dreamforce 2017. The goal of the initiative is to re-envision the development experience on Salesforce with a focus on how to empower their development community with the tools and processes needed to develop safely and effectively.

Salesforce DX is a very broad initiative, including several main teams at Salesforce focused on environment management, custom coding, developer tooling, APIs and more. Although the Salesforce DX teams tackle very diverse needs, their main focus (at least initially) is to improve the developer tooling and development lifecycle.

The tools and capabilities included in Salesforce DX are made available for free to all Salesforce customers. In that sense, Salesforce DX is an important complement to Trailhead, Salesforce’s free, self-paced, gamified, interactive learning platform. Trailhead is also a major investment for the corporation. Together these are intended to support the growth of skilled Salesforce professionals and to make it easier for those workers to build and innovate on the platform. These multi-year strategic initiatives help ensure that talent shortages and worker inefficiency will not be the limiting factor on the company’s aggressive 30% annual growth.

Summary

Salesforce is an extremely powerful and versatile platform. But it’s unique in many ways and it hasn’t been easy for professional developers to adapt their tools and techniques to working on this platform.

Salesforce DX is a major strategic initiative to ensure that industry best practices such as DevOps and modular architecture are possible on the platform. But making something possible doesn’t mean the process is straightforward. It’s still early days for most teams working to enable DevOps for Salesforce. Fortunately, there is an enormous amount of research and experience that can be borrowed from the broader IT industry. Combining a flexible, powerful platform like Salesforce with the speed and reliability of DevOps processes can open up entirely new levels of efficiency and effectiveness for teams.

— Andrew Davis