Description
What’s your long-term Salesforce DevOps plan? In this keynote, Jack McCurdy, DevOps Advocate at Gearset, kicks off Gearset’s virtual summit by exploring why developing a successful long-term Salesforce DevOps mindset requires more than just technical know-how — it needs a strategic alignment of tools, processes, and culture.
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Transcript
Howdy, folks. Welcome to Gear Sets DevOps Summit. If you've been in the waiting room or joined us a little bit early, you will have seen heard me say this a couple of times already. But for those that have just joined us, welcome to Gearset's DevOps Summit, where over the course of the next couple of hours or so, we are gonna be discussing developing a long term Salesforce DevOps mindset.
I'm really start excited to kick things off with everybody today.
You'll be with me for the next twenty five minutes or so before handing you over to one of three amazing breakout sessions that we have for you.
More information to come at the end before a super insightful panel session with some of Gearset's DevOps leaders where we're gonna be discussing the future of Salesforce DevOps. But without further ado, let's get started. So my name is Jack McCurdy.
If you haven't interacted with me before or attended a summit before, I am one of Gearset's DevOps advocates. I've worked for Gearset for the past five years and have spent my entirety of my life in the Salesforce ecosystem at Gearset.
So five years in Salesforce ecosystem, five years at Gearset. And throughout that time, I have seen exponential change in the way that Salesforce teams are approaching. One of the toughest things that we do in our day to day jobs as Salesforce admins, developers, or architects, or generally delivering on the platform, and that is deployments and DevOps more generally.
So I spent three years, on Gearsight sales team working with teams of all shapes and sizes to refine their release processes, make changes and tweaks that were gonna benefit the whole team, and really bring everybody across the team together to work in a cohesive way. And for the last two years, I've been in the role that I hold now as DevOps advocate. Spend a lot of time out in the Salesforce community, speaking at various Salesforce conferences, streaming events, and meeting with as many people across the ecosystem as possible to help spread the good word of Salesforce DevOps and share some stories and experiences and also learn from you all what your Salesforce DevOps experiences are as well.
It's a great privilege to be here today and be in this position to be able to give this talk and share a little bit of my journey with you as well as some predictions for what we might see across the Salesforce ecosystem as well as start a bit of discussion about why Salesforce DevOps has changed and where the advances in tooling and technology may take us if we're able to harness everything effectively.
So I wanna start this presentation with a bit of an analogy for you.
This image is hopefully very familiar to a lot of you, the Muppets Christmas Carol. Some of my colleagues on the call here, might be debating which member of the Muppets team I am right now myself.
But the reason that I think this is a good analogy, for those of you not familiar with the story, it it tells a story of a gentleman and his choices and his life at the moment and what that might mean for him in the future.
But the main thing that I take from this story and it's very much a story about life and a story about how the choices that we make today can change our future.
Very much so, I speak to Salesforce teams, and they believe the success of their processes or what they can do with their processes and technology are predicated by what's gone before it. And I've learned over the last five years that that is just not the case. And much like this story tells, this gentleman, Ebenezer Scrooge, he changes his behavior at the end of the movie on reflection of everything that has happened in his life prior to the day of the dreams that he has and the interactions with the ghosts that he has.
And that is a lesson for all of us. And when I think and think about how I help teams and think about how Gearset approaches the tooling side of Salesforce, DevOps, a lot of those teams and a lot of those Salesforce teams you speak to think that they are maybe stuck in their ways, and that just isn't the case. Your past does not predicate your future success. And for everybody on this call, that's the one thing that I want you to take away from today.
That wherever you are now, that doesn't dictate where you can go in the future and what you can change to improve your future.
And that really is the purpose of this story. And that's the really interesting thing about Salesforce DevOps. In Salesforce in general, we do have a lot of scope, even when it might not seem like it, to change what our future results might be. But we also can't change our future without understanding where we've been and where we are, which is why retrospectives are so important when it comes to the challenges that we face on the platform.
Now if you think a little bit about the past and Salesforce DevOps of the past, many of our stories may have started with this little fish. Now this little fish has and still can be the bane of a lot of people's lives. We started our Salesforce development journey, deployment journey with change sets or we may have been using AMP scripts. Salesforce is native tooling.
But what's more is that the acceleration of technologies that Salesforce were supplying natively and the ISP space that surrounded deployments that long term developer source driven mindset start to be introduced.
You know, these traditional ways of deploying on the platform and or traditional ways of deploying applications and software delivery weren't matching the expectations for those that came from those backgrounds to the Salesforce platform. We were we were wrestling with this little fish, and a lot of the times, it was very much and still can be a just keep swimming kind of mindset. You know? I have two kids, so there may be maybe more, there may be more kids' films references throughout this presentation.
But that is very much the mindset that a lot of folks are still in or certainly have been in, and it started with this fish. And as I alluded to, there has been a little bit of an evolution. Salesforce DX was introduced to maybe even retrofit, dare I say, some of the processes and some of the technologies that we have been more familiar with when we think about what DevOps excellence looks like from a tooling perspective.
Swades of ISVs entered the entered the space, many of them more prolific than others.
And this ecosystem was really surrounding the Salesforce community and these companies surrounding the Salesforce community to really drive a better way of working and remove some of that pain and bridge that gap that we were seeing with the introductions of the native technologies between admins and developers. Salesforce DX tooling very much geared towards developers and the coders on the platform, and the change sets for the admins. And that's why tools like Gearset came into the fray to try and solve some of these complexities and some of these challenges that we might have faced between those parties when it came to development on the platform and delivery on the platform.
I've spoken very much about deployment, and Salesforce DevOps typically has been very focused on just the deployment aspect of Salesforce DevOps.
And there's a reason for that, and that's because it's traditionally been quite difficult. And the challenges of change sets, the failures that we only realize when we get to deployments and the deployments fail, you know, those challenges and those frustrations are the ones that are most common. So this is why we have traditionally looked at just the deployment aspect of the DevOps infinity loop. But if we only focus on the deployment aspect of the infinity loop, that negates the true evolution of DevOps and where we're going.
It negates processes. It negates all of the planning that we come to realize is so important when it comes to not just the developing of new features or the monitoring of our applications that we are more familiar with today. This loop is really becoming synonymous with Salesforce development in general. We're now more concerned with more aspects of this loop.
Now some of those aspects that I mentioned, observability is a big one. The testing aspect of this DevOps infinity loop is also a big one. We also have, backup and that planning stage that I mentioned as well. And all of these aspects that are blended together to really provide our team a holistic overview, of holistic overview of our processes and our picture, we need to kinda look at some of the situations that have driven this importance. So whilst, yes, deployments are somewhat challenging and can still be challenging, and that's definitely a foundation level, We have experienced some things over the last five years or so that make more of this loop more important.
And some of us found ourselves in this situation. You know, everything's on fire, and we have to sit back and think, this is fine. We've just gotta get through it. One of those incidents, Permageddon. So Permageddon was an incident where, Salesforce deployed a deployed an update to a number of servers.
And throughout that deployment, a lot of their a lot of users woke up one morning with unprecedented levels of access to their orgs that they might not have had before. There was a lot of scrambling, from Salesforce teams to revert these changes that they had no oversight into. So when I talk about observability and monitoring of our Salesforce org, situations like this is when it becomes so important.
We have also had a number of headline data breach instance that have left major companies such as Meta with multibillion dollar fines on their backs because of failure to comply with things like GDPR, which is why things like backup and archiving are so important in the ecosystem now. So whilst DevOps might have traditionally just meant deployments and how we handle Salesforce deployments, DevOps is really encompassing all these challenges that we have on the platform.
And that's why a lot of teams, as we found in the state of Salesforce DevOps survey this year, if you haven't read that already, gearset dot com slash, dear I can't remember the URL, but if if you go on to Gearset's website under the resources tab, you can see the latest state of Salesforce DevOps report there. And that showed us that most Salesforce customers are still looking to fully migrate to permission sets. One of those aspects of Permageddon that we are trying to rectify and trying to solve, most Salesforce customers, seventy four percent of those, are still looking to do that migration, from profiles despite despite Salesforce now not sunsetting, profiles in their entirety. And those kind of things and those kind of projects are really important. And Salesforce DevOps plays a a huge part in the success of those kind of migrations.
And we can't do that. We absolutely cannot do that without systems in place and processes in place to support us when things go wrong. Like I say, those data breaches, like Meta had and GDPR compliance, we need systems that can support us in that. We need the people that have the operational rigor in their day to day so that when these things happen they're already when these things happen, they happen infrequently.
But when they do happen, the impact of those is minimized.
So tooling, whilst wholly important, it is incumbent on us as system administrators and, stewards of the Salesforce platform in our organizations, to be thinking about every part of this loop and every part of this cycle.
Another reason that we are more concerned with Salesforce DevOps and our overall delivery capabilities on the platform is the growth of Salesforce itself. So if we think about our own careers, our positions in our respective companies, and where we have got to whatever it is that we might be focused on. I know many people now that are CPQ experts in this space, for example, helping drive value, reducing some of the complexities around billing, etcetera, that have traditionally existed. I know specialists in various clouds and various technologies on the Salesforce platform, be it Flow, and you see Apex becoming a real, a real marker in the ground for a lot of folks that are interested in developing features and functionality that are designed to handle complex business processes.
The Salesforce, five years ago when I joined GearSat and entered the ecosystem, was a seventeen billion dollar company five years ago.
It's now a thirty eight billion dollar company. That growth is exponential, and that growth is really magnified when you think about all the cloud solutions that we have now. The customer three sixty that Salesforce has been advocating for for a long time, and now all the clouds that support it. And we are dedicated to improving the experience of our customers, and the Salesforce platform is helping us do that and expanding its capabilities and the potential reach that we have for our company's customers and our internal customers, in in our realm, again, underpinned by the tooling and technology, but we are the people that are gonna be responsible for doing this and getting the most value out of what can be a very significant investment for our businesses.
So we need to think about that. How do we design processes? How do we make sure that we have the tools, technology, and the people in the right roles, in the right ways that are gonna take us forward and help capitalize on a significant investment in an ecosystem that has grown exponentially.
So another great example of this, and tying our own involvement in today's summit to Salesforce's growth. I remember the first time that we ran, Salesforce, DevOps Summit, a gear set summit, back in twenty twenty one, I think it was. We had a hundred a hundred or so people register for that event. And DevOps streaming, much the same in terms of numbers. And then this year, DevOps streaming in Chicago, which happened, in May, And this summit just here right now so from a hundred folks that had registered their interest, we had nearly five hundred people register their interest and sign up for this summit. And that really goes to show the growth of the ecosystem, the growth of the importance of this topic, and why we're also invested in what happens going forward.
And we're we're entering a new era, And it feels kind of absurd to do any keynote or any talk these days in the Salesforce ecosystem or beyond without mentioning artificial intelligence because it's here, and it's here to stay. You know? Salesforce themselves are all in with the AI and the capabilities of the platform.
For anybody that's followed the Salesforce world tours or caught anything on Salesforce plus, Some of the capabilities that they are bringing in, through artificial intelligence are really impressive. But how do we do more, and how do we how do we make sure that we're harnessing this technology in the most useful way? How do we implement this technology in a way that makes sure it supports our people and it makes sure it supports our processes, whatever that might be? How do we make sure that this great new technology actually supports the objectives of our business and the objectives for ourselves in our roles? And that's something that I think we can all be super mindful of and something that we can play a big part in shaping how this technology is used.
I doubt that there is a single person on this webinar that has not used ChatChaPT, whether it's for them to write an email or review some text that they might have written. And how are we using that technology? How do we take that to the next level? And then that can only be done by reflecting on what has caused us caused us some level of maybe pain or anxiety or grief and using that and thinking how these technologies can help us and support us in the future.
So as we go through the rest of this day, I'd really like you to think about how we're gonna be using these solutions and these technologies to improve the processes and alleviate some pressure on us as people.
So we talk a lot about the tools in our toolboxes and AI, GearSet, those of you that are GearSet customers on this summit today, the tooling that we have available to us has existed for quite a while.
The gear set is coming up to eight years old.
And, yes, you will see today that the tooling is continually improving to make our lives simpler. But really understanding this shift in DevOps is to understand the cultural implications of improving those practices and improving our lives as, platform engineers and those that are improving, the experience for our end users. So not just, internally for our teams, but ecosystem wide. So with that tool tooling improvements and with those amazing new features that companies like Gearset are bringing to you, it's companies like Salesforce are bringing to you.
It is really on us, and it's incumbent on us to continue to make meaningful change and utilize technology and really think about what our job to be done is and really harness that technology in the best way possible. And that's why I'm really pleased about that we're gonna hear throughout the rest of these summits and the breakout sessions that will be happening in just a moment as well as the, as well as the future Salesforce DevOps panel session where we're gonna hear from some leaders, in the ecosystem as well, which we are very grateful to have their insight for. But, yes, it's not all about the tools in our tool belt. It's how we use them and how we can harness them to get the best results for our people.
And something that I talk about a lot, especially nowadays, is the future of DevOps and its human centricity. So I believe the future of human dev, of Salesforce DevOps is going to be human centricity.
Technology is well established and it's improving. But those that are focused solely on that technology and its capabilities and what it could possibly do. Looking at you, AI and all the fancy stuff that it can do. Those that are focused on solely on that and not how we apply it to the processes to improve, and our lives as human technologists are gonna be the ones that suffer the most.
And those are gonna be the ones that don't that don't take it to the next level. The ones that aren't gonna be able to use this technology in the best way, are gonna be the ones that get left behind. If we think about the job market even, the work from home shift, people's priorities are changing, and we need to live in a world and be able to operate in a way that supports a new lifestyle across the whole of the working demographic now. And we can do that through technology.
We can do that by thinking about what matters to us the most and applying it in the correct ways.
Now, I have sped through, sped through this keynote a little bit, and we have reached the end of the comments.
