Salesforce DevOps: Past, Present, Future

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The Salesforce landscape is constantly changing — DevOps and its part in driving change is no different. Join Jack McCurdy, Devops Advocate at Gearset at the opening keynote of Devops Dreamin’ to hear where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re going when it comes to delivering with excellence on the Salesforce platform.

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Transcript

Hello. Can everybody hear me? Everybody hear me? Hello. Good afternoon, Chicago.

Yeah. Woo.

Alright.

Very, very, very warm welcome to all of you that have come today, whether you be local to Chicago or have traveled from a little bit further afield, like we have all the way from the UK, it really means so much to all of us at Gear Set who have organized the event, and, of course, our wonderful sponsors who have invested the time and energy to come here and provide an amazing experience for the Salesforce community. So, I hope that you'll have a wonderful day and a half with us and that you really walk away with some great tips, best practices, or the things that you will need to succeed in your day to day jobs moving forward.

So the talk that I'm about to give is called Salesforce DevOps, present, and future.

And to set a little bit of context about why I decided to write this talk and give this talk is that this isn't the first DevOps streaming. There's some familiar faces in the crowd that have attended DevOps streaming before, which is fantastic to see. And the first DevOps streaming that we ran back in twenty twenty two had sixty five people.

Sixty five people back in twenty twenty two. We ran these events through twenty twenty two and through and into this year as well in various locations, Chicago, London, as well as Seattle.

And over that time, the attendance has increased from sixty five to a hundred and thirty to a hundred and eighty to just over two hundred in London last September turn it off.

Here we go. Got tech tech. Tech, we we good? We good? I'm getting the thumbs up from the audio visual guys. Sweet.

So that growth of just this conference over the last three years is testament to why this topic is important and why we should all be invested in the future of it. And you'll be pleased to know today that we have the most registered attendance of any time. So you beat London, Chicago. Yeah. Woo hoo.

So this is this is hopefully gonna be a good session and help people understand a little bit more about where we've been, where we are right now, and where we might end up going.

So for those of you that haven't met me before, I do see some very familiar faces in the crowd, which is always lovely to see. It makes me feel good and you make me feel good. But it's really Oh, we got we got we got face palms going on.

I am Jack McCurdy. I am one of the Gearset's DevOps advocates, and I've worked at Gearset for the last five years.

And over that time, I've previously worked in Gearset sales organization, and two years ago took the plunge in the DevOps advocate role. So I spend my time attending Salesforce community conferences, writing blog posts. I also run a podcast called DevOps Diaries, some of the guests of which are in this room, so yay.

If you're interested in more of that or think that you have a very vehement topic, I'm gonna plug my podcast here. If you wanna come on to the podcast and share your knowledge, then, chat to me afterward. So I spent five years in the Salesforce ecosystem. I joined the Salesforce ecosystem, with no knowledge, but all I've done is DevOps, and I've looked at the delivery side of things. It's where my experience comes from and that's where my knowledge comes from and what I've been dedicated to.

And through that experience with the sales, working in marketing, being involved across community conferences, it's given me lots of different perspectives about what teams care about and how things have changed over the last five years that I've worked here.

So bear with me a little bit with the analogy here. So what I think is really important for folks to understand is that if we think about the Muppets Christmas Carol story, you may think I'm a Muppet for making this analogy. I know some of my colleagues certainly did, when they saw the first slide.

If you think about the story and if you're not familiar with A Christmas Carol story, it's about a gentleman, that has a dream and he has taken through his past, his present, and what his future might look like. And many of us in the ecosystem, I found, think that our future is predicated on what has happened in the past.

And this story tells us that that's simply not true. So it doesn't really matter where you have been or where you are right now.

All you can do to change your future and the trajectory of your companies and how you deliver Salesforce for your organizations can be changed. And reflecting on where you are right now, where you have been, and where you would like to end up, not necessarily where you will be if you carry on following those practices or those behaviors, you can really change that future and you can really change things for the better. So hopefully that analogy makes sense. And let's see where I'm coming through it from as time goes on.

Yes.

Who's familiar with this guy?

Yeah?

If anybody, if anybody in the room has felt frustration or, a little bit of anxiety when they see this little fish, you are not alone.

When you previously when we've been deploying on the platform using change sets or using an ant, we will see this thing. And a lot of the feeling sometimes is, you know, just keep swimming. That's two movie references and two slides. Can you tell I have kids?

So this is where we have been.

In the past, change sets, and if you are more development style, this is where we are familiar with. And those traditional panes of deployments, those spreadsheets that we've kept tracking all of our changes, where we have missed out components or b, get unhelpful errors back from change sets are things that were once previously common.

So what the generally has moved towards is a better way of doing things. And if you're still doing things with change sets, that's great. Very often, I will still speak to Salesforce customers that still use change sets and that's fine because it works for them.

But when it's come to scalability and when it comes to adopting more advanced workflows, which a lot of you will be interested to learn more about over the next day and a half.

Traditional tooling and the traditional tooling of the past isn't gonna be enough from where we from where we are right now to where we wanna get to.

And like everything, the technology has evolved.

The way that we do things has evolved. So in correct me if I'm wrong, somebody from Salesforce, but, Salesforce DX was introduced in twenty eighteen.

Yes.

Yeah. Yeah. Nanos has given me the thumbs up. So twenty eighteen, Salesforce made a conscious decision to start improving the developer experience on the platform and with it Salesforce CLI and Salesforce DX, different metadata formats and source control. And we started to introduce more concepts that were more alien to those of us that have been working on the platform with declarative change.

And with that evolution of technology was the evolution of what we are expected to do with the platform.

So if you do identify if you do not identify as a Salesforce developer, raise your hand.

You're an admin architect, etcetera. So very many of you. Probably about sixty five percent of hands went up in the room there. And the concept of DevOps has previously been, it's a developer thing. Why do why do we need to care about it? We can't we can't do it.

Sixty five percent of you raised your hands here.

It is evident that what is expected of us has changed. Not just the tooling and the technology, but what's expected of us in our day to day roles has changed, and that will continue and continue and continue to evolve.

But with it came ISVs like Gearset, Capado, Flosome, those ones that you all might be familiar with. Yes, I can say the names of the other ones. It's it's alright.

It's alright. It's, it's a whole party. But the reason that companies like us exist is because we want to give you a better experience.

Those tools entered the fray. Tools like Provar entered the fray. Purple t pink t shirts, you can't miss them, have come into our ecosystem to make that development ex developer experience better, especially for folks like you in the audience that don't come from a traditional development background or familiar with writing code. And that perception has really changed, and I think will continue to change as time goes on.

Also, we very much talk about Salesforce DevOps as just the deployment.

So just the deployment. So I've already displayed the fish, and that's, you know, fun times. We're ready to push all brilliant things into production.

We do and that's traditionally what people have thought of in DevOps. So back when I started at GearSet, talking five years ago now, the main reason that people came to us is because they wanted to move away from change sets. They wanted a better way to deploy.

I think a lot of people do want a better way to deploy and now they want a solution that will grow with them, allow them to do things like continuous integration.

And to only focus now on that deployment part of your Salesforce delivery process is a bit of a fallacy.

And what people care about more now is the whole picture. So this is the DevOps infinity loop, if you haven't seen it before, where we across the Salesforce industry are more concerned with all of these things.

So we've got observability, testing, backup, and even the planning stages.

So what we've come to realize is that deployments can be streamlined through the efficiency and processes that we wrap around the deployment. And that's a major shift in what I've seen from back five years ago when I was speaking to Salesforce customers. We just want an easier way to deploy.

That's not what our consideration is anymore. We want tools and technology that can help us deliver this full life cycle.

Things like testing, Michael Daley from Provar is gonna be doing a talk later on today around testing and why that's so important. I highly encourage you to attend that session.

But these things we've realized as we try and speed up, we are expected to do more with less than we ever have been before, which can cause some amount of strain. It's something that I've spoken to a bit with guests on the DevOps Diaries podcast.

But being able to speed up this loop is something that we should all be able to do with the tools and technology.

But why do we care about this a little bit more? There's a couple of things that when I was writing this, I kind of identified and noticed a shift from.

And the first one the first one is, if I said 'permageddon', who understands what I'm talking about?

Permageddon one, two, three, four, a few a few of you. So there was an instant a few few years back where many Salesforce users looked into their orgs and people could see far more than they should do.

And what had happened was there was a bit of code that had been shipped that changed a lot of the permission sets, and users were reporting to their admins, to their architects, and what have you that this is Salesforce has all changed on us. Why why is Salesforce changed on us? It was those users reporting those stories that really highlighted the importance and really highlighted why observability is so important, why having a back So when this situation happened, that marked a shift. So it happened to a lot of Salesforce customers.

And that shift industry wide, I think, is one of the main reasons why we think about these things more. We need a disaster recovery solution in case things change. We had a lot of customers from Gear Set come to us and say, help us roll these changes back. We don't know how to do that. But customers so we didn't have that metadata backup. We couldn't restore those permissions as to what they were previously.

So people have started to realize that it's not a case of if things go wrong, it's a case of when things go wrong. And things will go wrong. This is what we tell our customers. And I'm sure if you spoke to the person next to you about where you are right now, have you ever experienced a data loss incident or metadata being written over, or what have you. The visibility into those things happening is crucially important so that you can maintain business agility in those times.

We don't want users being locked out or unable to contact their customers or be generally hamstrung by their systems failing.

And not just this situation, but it happens on a micro level. And one of the key statistics to this is, we run a survey every year called the State of Salesforce DevOps Survey.

And last just from last year, what we found is that ten percent more of teams now have a metadata and data backup solution than they did last year. More of those statistics I'm going to talk about in the key findings, from that. So if you're interested about more about where we've been and where we're going or what the current state of play is, comes to that talk tomorrow. Also being held by me.

So we can't advance and we can't move forward unless we have the systems in place to support that.

One of the other big things and probably the main driver for a lot of people in this room is that Salesforce is not the company it was five years ago.

Salesforce, when I joined Gearset in twenty nineteen, was a thirteen billion dollars revenue generating company. Is now a thirty five billion dollar company.

That seismic shift in the platform, what the platform can do for us now, is what is driving this need to deliver better.

So new features, if you think about flows, for example, there's a big shift in how we are looking to, drive automation on the Salesforce platform.

And flows have traditionally been challenging to deploy. That's why Gearset have developed a solution to help specifically with something like flows.

We are I said it earlier we are all expected to do more with less.

Salesforce teams are growing, but they are grow are being strained by more expectations.

What can what can we do to make sure that those that we do have in our team can still deliver the expectations of what the Salesforce platform values and what the Salesforce platform promises?

And we can do that through DevOps process that allows us to deliver that change in a timely manner.

Speaking of flows, we got a great talk on tomorrow as well. I plugged a couple of talks already, but Matt Peeper is going to be talking about, flows tomorrow, flow like a developer. I really recommend attending that session, especially if flows is a big topic.

So platform is changing, Salesforce is changing, and we need to keep up. We need to deliver that value that our stakeholders are expecting of us.

Salesforce is a big investment. Let's make the most of that and make sure that we have the reputation as a team that we need that we can confidently deliver everything that Salesforce promises.

It kind of feels absurd these days to do a keynote talk or any kind of talk that doesn't involve the mention of AI in some facet, way, shape, or form.

And we're entering a new era. If you want to learn more about AI, I'm going to plug another talk. Sergio Flores is doing a talk. Is that today or tomorrow?

Today.

Sergio Flores is doing a talk, today on AI and how you can navigate that space as it comes to DevOps.

Whether we take AI in its current format or whatever new disruptive technology comes, we need to be prepared for that.

How AI looks in your DevOps process may be very piecemeal, or it could form a very huge part of how you choose to deliver. And the trust that you place in the technology, you need to be confident that that is the right thing.

So having a good understanding of where you are right now, where you've been, and having a little bit of oversight about the potential impacts that new technology, disruptive technology, to use another buzzword, is gonna have is gonna be really, really important.

And how you combine those things, Charlie Isaacs is gonna be doing the keynote tomorrow morning, on harnessing the full power of the Salesforce platform of CRM, AI, data, and trust. So that's gonna be an amazing session. Charlie's a great speaker, so please make sure you mark time in your calendars to come along to that session. He may even do a cartwheel across the stage or something like that. I am not promising anything of the sort.

And the one the one thing is clear. So if you talk about Gearset, I've worked at Gearset for five years. Gearset has existed for seven.

A lot of the tooling that we have available to us has existed for a long time. That hasn't changed.

All that has happened that is adoption has increased, and what we are doing with those tools and those technologies has had compounding effect on our productivity, positive compounding effect on our productivity.

But we focus a lot on tooling in our space. We focus a lot in this space.

But the real shift that we have seen over the past five years and that I've experienced over the past five years is how we go about these things, how we incorporate the processes and wrap the tooling and technology around those processes.

And furthermore to that, we've also started to focus more on the people.

The people, like you in this room, are critical to the success of Salesforce, the success of the tooling, the success of the technologies.

When I first started at Gear Set again or a couple of years into my career at Gear Set, it was tools, tools, tools.

What we had to do was a lot of education and a lot of working with customers to identify the pains in their processes, the processes themselves. The technology, sometimes it wasn't helping, but the technology is there. I mentioned earlier, if you still use change sets and change sets is a good solution for you, and it helps you to do the things that you need to do, and you can do it in a timely manner, then great. You might not need a new tool, but the process that you go around those things is highly important to how you might be able to deliver, especially if you have budget constraints or what have you. So really to understand the shift in DevOps, we have to understand the shift in the culture and why people want to deliver more, why they want to do the best jobs that they can.

So to me, I believe that the future of Salesforce DevOps is human centricity.

So this is a topic that I speak about a lot. If you follow me on LinkedIn, you can see articles that I've written recently are very focused on the human aspects of what we are doing.

And I see this continuing to rise.

If we think about the last five years, we've been through through some stuff. We've been yeah. It's been a time.

If we think about the the impacts that those events in our personal lives obviously, talking about the pandemic, the job market that we've experienced, people's priorities are changing. People's priorities are shifting.

Through great DevOps practices and great DevOps processes, you can make your kid's ballgame. Like, that is a general that is genuinely something a customer said to me three years ago, was since we bought Gear Set, since we invested in our time, to implement a solution, I've been able to go home on a Friday night at four o'clock rather than staying up until two AM doing that deployment. Anyone still do that? Two AM deployments on a Friday night?

No one. Excellent.

Excellent.

These are the kinds of changes and the things that we need to consider. It's that human centricity and what we can do for the people in our organizations if we look at changing our process, if we look at investing in new technology, if we take a human holistic approach to everything, then then we're going to get better results. We're going to have happier people in our organizations doing better work just through those things. And that's something that I really encourage you all to think about. How can we improve the lives of our teams?

How can we make sure that everybody in this team feels valued and that they have the tools to support them to do the best work they can so that they can have the lives that they want outside of work.

I hope that's given everybody some food for thought. And hopefully the Muppets analogy, still sticks And that you have an idea of where you want to be and feel free to come up afterwards and call me a Muppet. You can tell me when I remind you of the most.

But hopefully with that mindset, I don't want you to walk away and think that you are stuck where you are right now.

We talk about progress, and we talk about moving forward a lot. And something that on reflection with a lot of customers and a lot of staff that I've worked with in organizations have realized that forward may not necessarily be the right direction.

If you are always striving for forward, you could be going in the wrong direction. You get to further away by moving forward. It may be a one eighty to look back on yourself and look back on the processes and the things that you might want to change, or the tools or the technology, whatever it may be. Forward may not be the best solution, but if we can drive to take the right steps in the right direction that makes the most sense for us, then I think we'll all be successful.

Thank you.