Moving to a modern CI/CD pipeline

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How do you build a modern CI/CD pipeline for Salesforce that will work for all of your team?

Find out in this session recording from the Gearset DevOps Summit back in October 2021. Chris Cope, Senior Director of Software Engineering, and Hongda Zhou, Senior Salesforce Administrator, share their success story at Xometry with Maritina Tsembelis, Strategic Partnerships Manager at Gearset.

They discuss how a transparent pipeline from Gearset gave the team vital visibility into the current status of work being deployed along the pipeline, rather than the painful manual deployment processes they were previously relying on. The integration with Jira, in particular, is also a useful way of tracking progress and measuring performance for the team — including Salesforce ROI.

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Transcript

And with all the benefits of modern DevOps now becoming increasingly clear as a lot of the talks today have discussed, exploring some of the practical side of how you can begin to make that change in your own company is one of the real hot topics in the community at the moment, and it's something that we often get asked about at. This is great. I understand the benefits, but how do I actually put this into practice? How do I adapt how I'm working right now?

And although every company is obviously different and faces different challenges, there are often some common themes that run across successful implementations, which we can all learn from. And I think we're already looking forward to hearing more about that from our speakers. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna hand over to Chris, Honga, and Maritina to say welcome to the summit, and, it'd be great to hear this from you. Hopefully, you can all hear me okay.

Excellent. I can see you. I will hand over to you.

Great. Thanks, Jason. I met Chris and Hongda a few months back when I first started on the partnerships team here at Gearset, and I was so impressed with the journey that they've had both with Salesforce and with Gearset. I'm thrilled that they're here today to share their story with us. Chris was Xometry's first DevOps engineer and now he leads, the teams at Xometry.

He has scaled the teams with automation as his top priority. And Hongda is the senior Salesforce administrator at Xometry, and he's focused on establishing a Salesforce CICD pipeline following best practices. Thank you both so much for being with us here today. Chris, would you mind telling us a little bit about what Xometry do in your own words?

Sure. So, so we're the world's largest, digital marketplace for, manufacturing. And that and that's to talk about other, like, to compare us with other digital menu marketplaces people are familiar with, like ride sharing, marketplaces, vacation rental marketplaces. Right? A lot of a lot of these industries have been transformed because you take something that's very, like a manual, sort of b to b or market you know, this manual process of, like, I want someone to pick me up and drive me there or I want to stay somewhere, for the weekend at the beach. We did the same we did the we did the same thing with manufacturing.

So in manufacturing, it's traditionally very inefficient. You have these supply chains that require a little labor to maintain, and, basically, we make it really simple. You someone wants something made. They come to our site. They say, here's my here's my design, and then they just check out as if as if they're ordering something on Amazon.

Yeah. I remember you describing, the process of just making a prototype, and it sounded so easy, using your platform.

And when we first met, I remember we spoke, a lot about Salesforce being a big part of Xometry's current and future business plans. Can you explain a little bit, about the business objectives, that Xometry achieves with Salesforce?

Yeah. So, we've been using Salesforce, Sales Cloud for about two years to support our sales team. That's probably the first time people get into Salesforce. I'm relatively new to Salesforce.

Hongda is a is a is a long time expert. And then really about, six, nine months ago, I think we made a decision as a company to kinda go all in and use that as our our core back office system. So, you know, the whole suite of of what service cloud, experience cloud, all the other all the other clouds can do. Yeah.

Yes. It sounds like you're really making it the backbone of your business there. So if we take a trip back in time, you mentioned, you've been familiar with Salesforce for a couple years. Compared to development in other areas of Xometry's platform, customizing Salesforce instances sounded like it was a bit slow and dependent on some manual processes for you. Can you share a little bit about the challenges that you were experiencing with Salesforce, before Hongda joined?

Sure. Yeah. So, I mean, we're we're a technology company. We're a software company. Right? And so, all of you know, most of what we do is build our custom app application, like, custom web applications.

So and I was our first DevOps, person. And so, so I I I'm sort of proud that we do all the DevOps stuff for all of our kind of custom made code, like, all of our microservices and our our, you know, micro front ends. And then Salesforce, because it's like this third party system to us, just really, as we started doing building a lot of development in it, it just kinda stuck out like a sore thumb. And we didn't I didn't really know what to do, because I wasn't experienced with Salesforce.

When Honda joined, we had, before he joined, we had an admin. We had two devs two two Salesforce developers, and it was just with the just with three people. It was, you know, we would do releases at night, off hours. We would, coordinate on Slack what we were doing.

We had version control, but the version control was like, we were using GitLab, but it wasn't hooked into Salesforce in any in any meaningful way. It was really just a a a central repository. All deployments were, you know, done from laptops for Salesforce.

And and yeah. So so deployments releases were very, like, heavy heavy handed.

And then quickly, Hamda joined, and we you know, what do we have? Three full time Salesforce admins, six Salesforce developers, and then we're trying to, get we have about a hundred developers total at Xometry, and a lot of our other developers are starting to, you know, use Salesforce as, like, a component for for, stuff that they're building.

And so we have we we're kinda we're getting a lot of, like, part time sort of Salesforce developers in a way.

And it, it would it was it was very difficult with three people, and, now it would be sort of impossible, just in, like, the last few months since we started using Gearset, and Grown if we weren't able to sort of, like, get, the sort of, like, DevOps parity with the rest of our our, software engineering practices.

And we and and that's, I think, been a big deal. So especially, I would say, the coordination between admins and developers, which is something we we hadn't really experienced in the rest of our platform. We don't have a lot of, you know, admins in our in our software that we build.

That was also a big a big one.

Yeah. We use Slack a lot internally as well. But I can imagine when you're trying to coordinate multiple teams, it's maybe not the best way to to go about scaling those processes. You mentioned, that you've already had a mature DevOps process in other parts of your business. Did that help you translate best practices over when you began using Gearset?

Yeah. I mean, we we knew what we we knew what we wanted. We knew what good look like. We just couldn't figure out how to, how to get that with Salesforce, without basically building it like, building all of the Salesforce inter, like, hooks and integrations and change sets, sort of building that all ourselves. So we couldn't we couldn't figure out how to do that in a in a time frame that, made sense to us.

Makes sense. And if you had to pick one, what would you say would be the biggest challenge or frustration with the old process?

I would say the lack of visibility. Like, we could deploy.

Salesforce is nice. It's refreshing because it actually has, like, code coverage requirements and stuff. But, there was no there was no visibility, as to what was getting deployed by whom, by when other than, like, Slack messages really for for Salesforce. Like, hey.

I just did this thing in Salesforce. Okay. Great. Thanks for you know?

And that that was hard. And then with, you know, with the rest of our platform, like, the one thing that we do we always kinda had parity with is, you know, lots of sandboxes and then kind of like a a full copy sandbox, like a stage environment, a pre prod environment, and coordinating usage of that, partials of that full copy sandbox was that was very that was hard with three people. It was very, very painful with five people, and then and then we started using GearSet and they got a lot better.

Yeah. That sounds great. And, Hunga, a question for you. Chris talked a lot about scaling your internal teams up, now that the business is increasingly, relying on Salesforce, for support. How has your release process changed, as a team, and which elements or features of Gearset, have you relied on the most to help you along that journey?

Yeah. That's a good question. I actually, I wanna share, like, two keywords. First one is visibility.

The other one is automation. So in terms of visibility, so as a start up, we have tons of, you know, very latest, you know, SaaS offerings, Jira, we use Slack, you know, git GitHub enterprise. All those are good a great feature good great tools we have. So GearSat, we use that to connect us between all these things to give us more visibility.

For example, we create all the user stories in Jira, and then we have out of box get, gear set integration with Jira. So every time I do a deployment, automatically, all the all the records are there in Jira. So that opens up the visibility to all the business users so they can see what's in the pipeline.

So, all all we can leave a leave a comment. It's it it's really help our, you know, product manager to better estimate because they can see when we do the deployment how long that will take. Right? That's on the Jira side.

And in terms of automation, you guys do a very good job integrated with Slack. Right? Now I have, automation monitoring tool that telling me every day who did what on my instance, why. So the next day I can do my audit.

Right? See, oh, that changed. I I didn't improve it. Why? Why is there? So those those, like, automation visibility are two big things I I wanna call really help me me day really, really good.

Thanks.

I'm I'm glad that it's, it's made such a big, big difference for you in your day to day. How long would you say it took you to reach a mature CICD process?

Oh, that's that's yeah. In in our case, geometry, actually, we are in the manufacturing industry.

But at the core, we are software software company. We use the latest AI technology to help, the buyers to get the the most accurate, quote for our suppliers. Right? So in our culture, we already have no loss of CICD things.

But I think for different companies, who are, in the different steps in their journey, it may take more times for other company companies. But in our case, especially we have, like, great leaders like like Chris who already have those backgrounds in CICD, it's easier for us to do that.

Yeah.

Amazing. And what would be your biggest piece of advice to other Salesforce teams that are, scaling up? Obviously, bringing in new processes and new tools isn't always roses and daisies.

Was were there any frustrations, that you had bringing GearSight and this new process Yeah.

Yeah. Absolutely. I can share something with you. So, actually, the biggest thing is that GearSight is built on top of Salesforce metadata API, as we know. Sometimes I there's one one chance that I I found a bug in their API.

And any Salesforce, you know, devs, you if you have experience talking with sales of support, you know, like, their their support to developer are not so not as good as good as that, I will say. So yeah. Because our tools, I'm sort of rely on, something on the Salesforce side, that is where the, you know, my my frustration coming from. But I also wanted to share the experience talking with GearSoft support. You guys are always there, real person, five time five minutes, you know, reply, within within chat. Those are really great things.

Keep the keep keep up with the good work. I really enjoy working with, the real person, on the other side, at the chat.

Basic. That'll be good news for, for Jason, because that's those are his team. So, it's always nice to hear, such nice feedback.

Got a few minutes left. So, Chris, I'm gonna turn it a little bit, further back to you, and just ask you a little bit more about the business impact, that you've had since bringing in a more mature DevOps process. What has what has that been for you at Xometry?

Yeah. I mean, it's all about, it's all about velocity. Right? So or value delivery. I mean, we've been we've been able to over three months, I think, move a lot of teams, hundreds of hundreds of staff, off of, hodgepodge a a collection of systems that they were using before, now consolidate on Salesforce. Over the next couple months, it'll be another, probably another couple. The the other couple hundred, we haven't done yet.

And that would have been, you know, again, with all of the developers that we have to to swarm on this, like, we never we couldn't have gone as fast, because of the just the the visibility and the stepping on each other's toes.

So I think that's been, like, that's been crucial for our success. It's just, like, it allows us to move quicker, innovate faster.

You rollbacks. So we do rollbacks everywhere in in DevOps. Right? And being able to rollback in Salesforce was was something that we we didn't really know how to do.

And and it's just you click a button. It's easy. So that allows us to, like, experiment fast, move faster.

What else? We're you know, just normal DevOps, you know, upping your DevOps game stuff. We are able to do lots of deployments, like, during the business day as opposed to saying we're gonna do, you know, one big change, change set at night. So, yeah, it's just just pure velocity leads to, business value.

Well, there's a lot to be said for getting your weekends back.

And as far as what's next for you, what's next on your Salesforce journey, on your DevOps journey? What kind of future features from GearSat are you looking forward to using, the most?

Yeah. We're actually super excited to see the pipeline, the visual pipeline that they that during the presentation, you guys, you guys, present. I already checked, with your rep to get us onto a pilot program. So really looking forward to use that.

Amazing. Well, I'm sure, the team would be more than happy to sign you up.

Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Great. Well, thank you both so much for your time. We really appreciate your insights, your enthusiasm, and we're so grateful for your time. Jason, back to you.