What is Salesforce DevOps?

DevOps is the new buzzword on the street. If you are responsible for making changes and deploying changes in Salesforce, then you need to know about DevOps Tools.

DevOps is not just a job task, it’s quickly becoming a job role in its own right. As the industry realises the limitations and challenges of traditional methods we are seeing the maturity and benefits of App tools.

Companies are now paying for DevOps specialists with a great salary tag, so it’s something to have on your CV. DevOps Apps can accelerate salesforce development, while also decreasing bugs and issues. This means bigger business impact, and faster.

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How to advance your career with Salesforce DevOps

Salesforce teams are increasingly turning to DevOps as a way of managing their development and releases on the platform. The rapid adoption of Salesforce DevOps by companies across all industries and sizes is opening up exciting career opportunities for both new entrants and seasoned professionals in the Salesforce jobs market. Getting ahead of the game could be one of the smartest career moves you can make right now. Adding DevOps knowledge and expertise to your Salesforce skill set will set you apart from the crowd and could put you on a lucrative career path.

What is Salesforce DevOps?

DevOps is the industry gold standard for how companies manage their Salesforce processes: customising orgs and building new features, then shipping that work along a release pipeline for integration and testing before release to production. The great news is that Salesforce DevOps is for everyone. It’s an agile way of working that empowers all Salesforce professionals to contribute to an iterative development and release cycle, whatever their technical skill level or particular job role. Among its core objectives, DevOps aims to: 

• Increase the frequency of new work that’s released to production
• Enhance the quality and reliability of new features and functionality
• Speed up deployments and testing along an automated release pipeline
• Improve collaboration among admins, developers and business stakeholders
• Build resilience with full visibility into changes, incl. options for rollback and recovery

These DevOps objectives translate into significant benefits to businesses, helping companies to get the most out of their Salesforce investment. More frequent releases, for example, mean teams can respond quickly and in a flexible way to changing business needs and opportunities. By continuously delivering small improvements and iteratively building out new functionality, teams are better able to respond to business priorities while incorporating continual feedback from stakeholders at the same time.

At the heart of this process, Git-based version control gives teams a powerful way to collaborate and coordinate a complex pipeline with multiple contributors and different streams of development and customisation work. Using DevOps tools like Gearset, each contributor can easily interact with version control, push new work items to release, and keep all the team’s development environments in sync. Version control also makes it possible to add automation to workflows, which dramatically reduces the huge amounts of time teams otherwise have to spend on manual and error-prone processes, such as deployments and testing. In turn, this frees up teams to spend more time adding value for their end users.   

What’s the earning potential?

As ever more companies make the transition to Salesforce DevOps, the demand for Salesforce professionals with knowledge of DevOps is increasing rapidly. From a recent industry survey on The State of Salesforce DevOps, it’s clear that what’s driving this trend is the growing volumes of work that companies now require from their Salesforce teams, in part due to the acceleration of digital transformation and the shift towards more online operations.

This trend, already at an all-time high, will only increase in the future. So it’s perhaps no surprise that DevOps specialists are the highest paid Salesforce professionals in 2021.

But DevOps expertise isn’t just for the specialists. Precisely because DevOps is a way of working that’s practised collaboratively by all members of a team, the demand for talent is there at all levels. Whether you’re seeking a new role as an admin, developer, architect or consultant, understanding the core concepts, tools and workflows involved can get you a long way and help you to progress your career.

Opportunities for professionals with DevOps knowledge currently exist across all industries and types of company. That said, larger organisations and enterprises with bigger Salesforce teams and more complex processes are more likely to have a greater demand for DevOps know-how and will pay a premium for that expertise.

Take your first step with DevOps Launchpad

A great place to learn all about Salesforce DevOps is on Gearset DevOps Launchpad. This fun training and certification platform hosts engaging and industry-relevant courses written by DevOps experts. The platform is available for the whole Salesforce community and offers free courses on all aspects of Salesforce DevOps – for beginners right through to experienced DevOps practitioners.

The courses are broken down into bite-sized learning items with short quizzes to test what you’ve learnt. After you’ve completed a course, you can download a free certificate to demonstrate your knowledge. Although DevOps Launchpad is managed by Gearset, most of the courses are vendor-agnostic and don’t tie you into using any specific tool. The aim of the courses is to give you a solid understanding of core DevOps concepts and processes, which will help you to get up and running quickly.

GET STARTED WITH DEVOPS LAUNCHPAD

Learning about Salesforce DevOps is a gradual process and, as with any discipline, specialist expertise requires practical experience. As a broad outline, the following are the tools, concepts and processes you will become familiar with as you make progress on your DevOps journey.

Beginners & Novices

• Learn about development on Salesforce and modern release management.
• Get to grips with the fundamentals of version control.
• Try out a DevOps tool like Gearset to become familiar with deploying subsets of metadata from version control to and from an org.

Practitioners

• Become familiar with using version control as your source of truth.
• Learn how to commit changes, open pull requests and review the work of other team members.
• Explore the benefits of different Git branching strategies.

Experts

• See the benefits of CI/CD, automated unit testing and change monitoring.
• Seed sandboxes with production data to test out new features.
• Find out about all that Salesforce DX has to offer.

Luminaries

• Research backup solutions and best practice for disaster recovery.
• Look into data compliance and tools for managing data protection.
• Investigate modular, package-based development models.

Get hands on!

 If you want to get hands-on and try out all that modern Salesforce DevOps has to offer, you can get started today with a free 30-day trial. There’s nothing to install in your org and you can get going running org comparisons and testing out deployments in no time.

Start your free trial

“Fast, successful deployments that you can schedule! I love @GearsetHQ. I needed to do an early morning deploy which interferes with my kids school/daycare travel. But no big deal, build the deploy, validate, and scheduled so I didn’t have to do anything but confirm it was done this morning. Goodbye change sets!”

Brian Kwong | Salesforce MVP | VP of Delivery & Operations | BetterPartners.com

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