Salesforce DevOps Wrapped 2024

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So welcome everybody to Salesforce DevOps wrapped twenty twenty four.

The aim of today is to take a look back at the year that we've come. January seems like an awfully long time ago, and a lot of amazing things have happened throughout the year.

We're drowning in agent force content, so, which we will talk about, a little bit, a little bit later in this webinar, but lots of things have started to happen, and continue to happen as it pertains to DevOps and Salesforce ecosystem this year. So I brought a great panel together to discuss some of those things that have been happening, and, let's go around the room and introduce everyone. So first and foremost, I'm joined by Rob Cowell. Rob, say hello to everybody, please.

Hello, everyone. How are we doing?

Rob is joining me as one of my colleagues from GearSet, the other of the two DevOps advocates here at GearSet, brings a lot of knowledge to the table, Salesforce developer by background before joining us a couple years ago.

If you are not familiar with Rob, you will see him on various places, social media networks, sharing his DevOps quick bites, and a lot of his content and knowledge, across the Salesforce ecosystem.

We are joined by Blanca Leon Carter. Hi, Blanca.

Hi, Jack, and thank you so much for having me on this panel. It's always a great time to talk about something that is a passion area of mine, and I have a lot of professional experience. And so I'm excited for this conversation.

Yeah. Absolutely. Me too. And thank you thank you for joining us.

Blanca is a alumni member of the Gear Set DevOps leaders program and a Capado champion as well as a a a DevOps DevOps connoisseur.

Lots of content from Blanca, online, online about that. I'm really passionate in in the industry. So, it's a pleasure to have you. And finally, last but not least, Jeb, Jeb Garrett. Welcome, well, welcome to the show.

Hi. Thanks for having me.

Welcome from sunny Orlando where it is currently fifty nine degrees, so I feel bad for, people that are in Chicago and Michigan.

But, you know, down here in Florida, it's very nice today.

We had sun, but it is not that warm here. So I am envious, Jeb.

Oh, dear.

Jeb, thank you thank you for joining us. Jeb, also a member of the, alumni cohort of Gear Set DevOps leaders and has a ton of experience bringing great DevOps to the teams that he's worked in. So really, really, really grateful to the three of you for joining me on this webinar and talking about twenty twenty four and some of the amazing things that have happened. So number of things, number of things to talk about, throughout the year. But one place that I wanted to start with in this conversation was about tooling specifically and Salesforce tooling itself. So one of the things that happened this year is Salesforce retired, the AMP migration tool.

And Blanca, you actually said something really interesting in the in the pre call to this.

So not only does the retiring of Ant show the development and the change in which ways people are adopting newer technologies or differing ways of things, but the retiring of the old tool, we're also seeing that as a requirement in job specs still. Being on the job market yourself, you're still seeing it coming up. What what what are your thoughts on that?

Yeah. I, thought of it as a huge opportunity for us to get the word out more stronger as DevOps advocates and really just get everyone to understand what those DevOps look like in the Salesforce ecosystem today. Right? I think that when you see, older tools that are being decommissioned and when we think of, you know, older pipelines that maybe take one highly skilled person who's working in a cube somewhere to manage it. And and that's not true of of how our teams look like, right, at these companies.

And as a consultant, we've seen a variety of sizes and teams and different levels of skill sets and expertise, but it's concerning to definitely see it still as a requirement on job descriptions when, obviously, the job description is out to date already.

So we need to get everyone on board with understanding these trends. And so I was really excited about this event because it is a crucial point. Right? You wanna make sure you hire on for the good skill sets and make sure that you're staying, abreast of the best practices and the tooling that are there, currently that your teams can leverage, and and so I'm here to help make sure we can amplify that need in our broader ecosystem.

Yeah. For sure. And and, Rob, you actually wrote a blog post about this for Gear Set when they retired your retired the AMP migration tool. What are your kind of thoughts about how the retiring of such tool is, taking us forward into a new era.

It's an interesting one. And, you know, I back in the day, I was in the trenches using Ant, for for the deployments, you know, before before sort of, the market had moved on a bit. I think there there is another sort of interesting perspective on it being in a job spec, though. In fact, you know, if you find someone that's still doing DevOps today that knows Ant, chances are they've been doing DevOps a while.

I mean, obviously, you know, it it's one facet. It's the it's the deployment facet of DevOps, but it does tend to sort of implicitly suggest that there might be quite a quite a deal of experience there. And I think, you know, the longer the time elapses since it's been retired and people are still listing it, then, you know, maybe that's an indicator of I've I've been at this DevOps game a little while. So, you know, every every cloud has a silver lining.

But, yeah, I think, you know, it's probably the right move from Salesforce on a couple of fronts. One is, you know, it's technical debt effectively. You know, it's somebody else's project, you know, and in its in its own form. And then, obviously, they have to constantly update it and and maintain it to make it work with Salesforce with the, like, the overlays and the scripts that that make it a, Salesforce specific tool.

But, also, you know, from a a very sort of strategic and commercial thing, you know, Salesforce have entered the chat as it as they say. You know, we've got DevOps center now. So I think, you know, there's potentially a bit of sort of strategic thinking behind that as well as the the practical sense as well.

Yeah. Jed, what what are your thoughts on that? Rob's mentioned DevOps center there.

Where where do you think we might be going or the wider ecosystem might be going with the adoption of new new tools and technologies? I mean, to even talk about change set seems almost antiquated these days, especially with DevOps in in the fold. What are your thoughts?

Yeah. So, I mean, I it's the same with anything else. Right? You know?

Things change over time. New technologies come out, new ways of thinking.

I think this is just another iteration of that.

You know, seeing Ant in, you know, job postings to me, you know, to the point it is a little antiquated. So it lets lets you kinda think, you know, what's the what's the purpose of that? Is it just kind of like a situation of, well, if it's not broke, don't fix it. You know?

And that's, like, the mentality that these people are going with, or is it something like, hey. We want someone who's experienced in that maybe to take that next step and have more knowledge into, moving to better solutions. But, you know, bringing up DevOps center and and the way that, that's going, I mean, it really seems, very similar to, I would say, what I've seen in my journey over the last five years, working with Gearset, in that, you know, there there's a lot of things. I I just hopped on the, kind of the road map that they had the other day on the dev side, for DevOps center, you know, when they talk about a lot of things that, you know, we've seen in Gear Set over the years.

You know, Jira integration, GitHub enterprise, you know, their data cloud, pre and post deployment steps, which is actually one of the, components that, our release manager was recently, kinda testing out and moving into our org as far as a pilot program.

And I think we're gonna continue seeing this, integrations with other third parties.

As time goes on, you know, things change, new tools come out, people see value in different pieces and, how those, you know, kind of go together. And I think that's the big thing with DevOps center. Right? Like, it's getting everyone exposed to, Git and, you know, a lot of people, like you were saying, in change sets, change sets didn't didn't incorporate Git. And now that's really becoming more of a standard, and I think Salesforce sees that, and they want that to be the standard that everyone uses moving forward.

Yeah. For sure. Blanca, your your opinion is on DevOps center. You're very familiar with, the leading providers of DevOps ops solutions in the market.

What's your opinion on Salesforce's offering, with DevOps center and how it's progressed? Obviously, they released Jira. They're looking at the issue tracking. They've released support this year for Azure, Azure DevOps as well. What's your take on how they're developing that platform and where they're going?

Yeah. I think that the team over at Salesforce is working diligently to stay committed in providing a tool, that can help, not only with deployments but also ALM. Right? How are they managing their work and having more visibility into, where work is in in the pipeline and in what stages is important.

However, it is a newer tool and like with any if you buy a car that's a brand new model, my mom goes against getting the ones that ever just released because they're not really polished yet. Right? There's trying to figure out how efficient they are and, what areas people like most to improve over the years. So, normally, we stay with the the lines within the brands of cars that have been there longer.

And not to say that that's a bad thing, but some teams need a tool. They need a system that, will maybe be an easier lift for them that won't cause for a lot of, need for highly skilled individuals to manage. And in that case, DevOps centers is definitely an option, but I I don't see that Salesforce is trying to compete with those, like, of Gearset and other entities. And let's just say the truth of the matter is is we've seen a lot of shifts in, you know, who are leaders within these tooling offerings that we have in vendors.

And I think that playing field is getting a little bit crowded this year, which is maybe a good thing because we're a little bit behind when it comes to, DevOps for the SaaS world as it relates to Salesforce and how we need to work. And I'll just say that, you know, the introduction to Git is the biggest standing point. Right? When we think about, DevOps maturity, you know, I like to use that image of raising kids, and they crawl first.

But in order for them to start walking or running or doing any kind of sports, they have to be able to stand their ground tall and and be strong in that in that grounding.

And I will I will say that it's good that a lot of people are using version control systems and getting into Git. I think that there's been the release with the new CLI and looking at Salesforce making an initiative to have a unified, you know, command line, interface for us to use that's not siloed by product, but yet it's helping bring more looking at developers and the actions that need to be taken across all of the product lines, which is another improvement for this year.

Yeah. Absolutely. And, the rising continued adoption of Git is something that I wanna get onto in just a second. Jeb's mentioned it, and, Blanca, you've just mentioned it here again. Now, Reid makes an interesting point in the chat as well, though, saying don't underestimate the likelihood that job descriptions are just being copied over and over, often from completely different entities, again, by hiring managers and HR that are not familiar with the actual needs of the roles they're looking to fill.

Is that something that rings true either, Blanca, from you from the the job seeker side? I know, unfortunately, that you've spent a bit of time in the job market, or Jeb for from yourself as somebody, across that kind of more team lead team lead position.

I'll I'll go ahead and start on this one.

I I think there's I think there's an element of truth there. Right? You know, we I would say myself, like, I spend a lot of time in the beginning putting together, you know, this is what we're looking at for our admins or our developers, spending time with HR putting those together. As time goes on, you know, maybe I put those together a year ago or two years ago, and, you know, suddenly there's a situation where someone leaves or, you know, we have an opening.

And the first thing HR does is just goes back to that previous you know, what's the latest that we have here? Now you would hope that they would come out and, you know, be like, oh, before we do this posting, we see this as old. This has come through. But, you know, everyone's process is different, and it's, you know, obviously, time is fleeting.

So, you know, they're gonna do the best that they can. So, I think there's definitely an element of truth there.

Yeah. I would agree. And, yes, I have been looking at a lot of job descriptions as I have been on search for the next, career, path there. And the one thing that I like to emphasize is that we need to go back and think of, you know, who's managing Salesforce these days. It's not always within IT.

In my many years of consulting, we've seen a large number of companies that have a business side department that has been the decision maker and have provided the financial support to invest in embracing a CRM like Salesforce and bringing that digital transformation that they need to the companies. However, there still lies that disconnect of, okay. Well, how do I adequately staff the CRM team that needs to maintain this once we've implemented?

They are sometimes depending on where they sit and how close of a relationship they have with their IT department. Sometimes dev ops is a total foreign curveball that is coming their way, and they're trying to very rapidly adapt to how do they manage it. And so I think that, that still is true, and we just need to have some more conversations and, help enlighten and advocate for the right roles.

I've seen a company who was under the impression that they had a release manager, and then it turned out they asked, you know, us as a consultancy firm, can you help us draft something? Because, obviously, we're not looking for the right thing. We thought we had this covered, and we haven't. And it's a learning curve. Right? Like, embracing any new learning technology, let's lean on those experts in the ecosystem, whether they're within our companies or externally, to make sure that we have the best path forward and how we're going to staff and implement and maintain so that we can remain secure and scalable.

Sure. For sure. So coming back around to the Git we've just the Git Verge control, to to some in the Salesforce ecosystem, one of the talks that I've done a couple of times at community conferences this year and at those streaming events has been, learn Git for admins and teaching admins to Git. Both both both times I presented that, the session's been really well attended, which is obviously great great for me to to share that knowledge, and it really does seem that Git and version Git or version control is becoming a really integral part of people's processes moving forward, which is fantastic for us to see. Rob, just coming to you on on this topic, what do you say about the rise of Git and version control through unified workflows and within Salesforce teams?

I think it does a few things. I mean, you could look at it through the the technical lens and say, yes. You know, everybody's committing their changes, whether it's code or low code, metadata, you know, configuration. Everything goes through that same process, which means that everybody's on the same page.

Everyone is working the same way. It definitely speaks to, you know, the collaborative approach that we always push for in DevOps. But I think there's there's a bit more to it than that as well. I think that, you know, by doing that, I think that you get this sort of increasing accountability.

I think people better understand what each team are doing. So, you know, it's very easy to, you know, to to be a a a full on sort of hardliner developer and say, you know, I'm I'm deep in the code. I I don't care what your your config stuff is. Equally, it's, you know, it's easy for an admin to, for example, add a new validation rule or a new required field, which suddenly trips up your developer's test.

So I think, you know, by not just the, you know, having the visibility of that, but having the conversations and actually working that way. You know? Git is is is a way that enables that. You know, we always talk about how the the technology is, like, twenty percent of the bottom and actually talking to your fellow, Salesforce professionals is the other eighty percent.

But, you know, Git is the way that sort of does a lot of the technical enablement of that. And I think, you know, it doesn't have to be that scary. And I think admins, you know, through through the work that we've both done on, you know, Git for admins, it it is a perennial favorite of mine as well.

You know, suddenly people say, you know, I get this now. I I understand the why. And I think that's the big part of of DevOps, whether it's version control or backup or any of the other various sort of parts of that entire DevOps life cycle. It's if you can get people to understand the why they need it or or the why it's a good thing or what problem it's solving, things naturally tend to fall into place anyway.

Yeah. Joe, do you have any comments around that around the teams, that you have worked in previously or currently, with implementing a good DevOps DevOps solution at Gear Set or otherwise? What's that learning curve been like for some of the members of your team?

Yeah. So I have I have a lot of experience in this. I I come from the side of, not being a developer first. I was an admin, who kind of worked worked into the role. And, you know, I remember at my last position, that's when, DevOps really became, you know, focused where it's like, hey. Let's stop using change sets. Let's see what's better.

And, you know, to the point that, Blanco is kinda bringing up, you know, a lot of products are purchased from upper management making decisions, not necessarily what, you know, the IT or the technology team is looking at. And that's kind of how we were thrown into it. First, they had purchased Capado. No one had any experience in Capado, and it kinda fell on me to be like, okay.

Well, let's learn this. And through that, started learning about Git and and, you know, it's the same thing Rob's saying, showing the admins the value of it and where this is kinda coming in. I have a person on my team right now who is is honestly one of the most skilled, admins I've ever had the pleasure of working with and, you know, been working in the industry for ten years. This is and coming onto my team was the first time they had experience with, using Git.

And, you know, they were just very interested in it. I mean, there's so much to learn. I think once people get ahold of it, once people have a tool like GearSet whether it's GearSet or Capato or, DevOps Center or, you know, Click Deploy, whatever it well, Click Deploy is not around anymore. But whatever that tool is, once you start seeing and getting, you're like, oh, okay.

This is what the metadata looks like behind the scenes. This is what it's actually doing. You start going down that rabbit hole, and you really start seeing, the value there. I mean, being able to enhance your code review process, being able to enhance your DevOps process.

You know, one of the biggest things that we had is, before we had, any sort of tool, it was we had a Google Sheet, and you listed all the metadata items that you wanted to deploy. And then, comes along the release manager, and they would spend hours putting together a even with some of, like, the browser tools that you have for change sets, but they would spend hours putting together, that release.

And now, you know, that we're using, Gearset and we have, tools like that, you know, you can have the confidence that, hey. Here's, you know, almost like that object oriented programming approach. Right? You have, this compiled group of what this change is.

We have confidence that when it's going into the next org, it's going to be what we want it to be. And we have confidence that as we combine it with other changes that people have made, that if there is a problem, we're gonna be notified about it. And if not, you know, it can move up. So it saves you a lot of time.

It is a big step for admins to learn about that. But if you have a good mix of admins and developers, I find that the developers like teaching the admins about it. They also like being involved with it, and the admins like learning about it. It's really one of the more I would say of all the products that I've I've put in place, it's been one of the more fun areas that I've I've been involved with.

Yeah. Blanca, is that in your yeah. Go on. Sorry.

I was gonna say I agree a thousand percent. So when I first started off in consulting nearly five years ago, I was introduced to a tool that brought us all together, whether you were QA, whether you were on the config side, whether you were on the code side, you know, whether you were the technical architect, it didn't matter. Every everyone on the team was unified in collaborating through that tool, and that just blew my mind and one of the reasons why I really gravitated towards this space. And I think that, you know, being the lead one of the three amazing leaders who runs Rad Women, a nonprofit program that teaches, people who are women or identify as non binary around the globe.

If they have two years plus of admin experience, we will, allow them to apply to our courses to learn Apex so that they can transition into junior developer developer architect roles, or sometimes they wanna stay in the admin roles. And I know there was a controversial post on social media. I don't know if it was this year or, or not, but it was fairly recently, and it was something around the lines of admins don't wanna learn Git. They don't wanna learn about version control.

And I could say that was so untrue and got shot down right away by a bunch of people globally.

And the truth of the matter is is that our teams are faced with a lot of challenges. We have to keep up with the pace of innovation that we're expected to deliver. We're expected to deliver at very high quality and a fast pace. So the more and more you layer on the challenges, it's like a big onion that starts festering.

And if you don't have the proper, understanding of how to do things and incorporated everything from what Well Architected from the Salesforce team has and a framework for us to think of and how we work, how we communicate, how we build trust, and work more efficiently as a team together reaching a unified goal, and that is smoother deployments because smoother deployments leads to us shipping innovation more often and satisfied customers on the other end. And with those challenges, everyone needs to be hands on deck, and I've seen a lot of folks, not just even from the admin area. There's

people from QA that are like, I need to get an understanding of this. Do you have some resources? You know? So it really is, something that even very strongly BAs want to understand, project managers want to understand.

And as our, you know, teams get smaller and smaller, especially with this economic climate in technology, we need to get more scrappy. We need to have more table shaped, you know, team members, that bring different skill sets but highly specialize in those areas and that can contribute and work we work better together.

Yeah. DevOps as a shared responsibility is one of those topics that has been on the rise, and I do feel, like you say, Blanca, that that is one of the areas that is becoming more and more important. You know? If you even if you look down, towards, like, the business analysis part of any project or business as usual things is the question is, how do we deliver this thing, or do we have a system in place that will allow us to robustly handle that? And, Rob, I don't know if you have any any kind of opinions on that on the democratization of DevOps and DevOps the the whole DevOps life cycle even becoming more important and more considered by more members of, Salesforce or IT team.

Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I I always look forward to the moments in these chats when you say, Rob, do you have any opinions? Because I always do.

But, but, seriously, yeah. Absolutely. I know. And when when you mentioned business analysts there, you know, my heart warmed because I've been a big champion of getting business analysts, you know, way back at the the the start of any development pipeline when you're gathering the requirements to understand DevOps concepts.

Not the technical, not the not the how we deliver, how we monitor, how we manage, you know, but understanding as a as a principle, breaking things into small incremental chunks because that lends itself so well to small incremental improvements that we deploy through Git, feature branching, and all that kind of modularity that we get from the technical side of DevOps, it begins with how we design the requirements and how we set those user expectations around, okay. We're gonna do this, you know, and we'll we'll have this rapid feedback cycle. You know, we'll do it in in little pieces so you can make sure that we're steering it in the direction that actually works for you as the business rather than, you know, the the old school traditional waterfall model.

You know, I don't wanna get into the the politics of agile. Some people are forced. Some people are less keen these days. But, you know, the the idea that, actually, as we're going along, we're gonna keep you in the loop so that you know whether we're actually listening to what you've asked for and and, you know, we've understood what you've asked for and that we're implementing it in the right way.

So I think, yeah, the democratizing democratization of DevOps isn't just a technical facet. I think, you know, as Blanca said there, you know, the QAs want in on the action because, you know, some of the, the technical aspects is automating their testing, right, reducing their workload.

As DevOps practitioners, automation's always been key to a lot of the things that we're able to achieve. But I think also, you know, it's like at both ends of that whole delivery and, you know, users included, understanding how we deliver helps us deliver better.

Yeah. And I also just add understanding that DevOps doesn't start right before deployment. DevOps. Right?

We already stated only twenty percent is a tool. DevOps is a way of working. It's a culture. It's a whole mindset, and it is truly about collaboration, increased transparency, and efficiency.

Yeah. And and to the point of what Rob was saying, like, an incremental approach, and you kinda touched on one of the things that I feel like I talk more and more about every day, which is, like, you know, different, development philosophies between, like, waterfall and, you know, and agile and scrum and all this. But, you know, definitely looking at it, and this is what we did. You know, where's the value and what do I think people can learn in the beginning? Like, what are they gonna tag onto and how are we gonna grow from there? I mean, when if you look at our, development pros or our DevOps process, when we first started using Gear Set versus now, it's completely different.

It was really, you know, more like, hey. Let's just do straight org to org deployments, but get a pipe you know, get a general pipeline kind of going. It wasn't the actual pipeline tool. Get people used to that.

Okay. Once they're used to that and they're used to using feature branches, even though, you know, version control hasn't been, really applied yet and we don't have, kind of like those, security gates, to stop, you know, different issues that come up. We were just kind of, like, overriding things. Once people got kinda used to that, it's like, okay.

Take the next step and kinda move from there. And I think that's really the way to get adoption. Also, I think Git is a huge, kind of, way for your Salesforce team to work with your non Salesforce team. I find more and more, we have integrations with other groups, software teams inside the companies that are not working in Salesforce.

But Git seems to be the if if your Salesforce team knows Git, the software team's gonna know Git. There's gonna be a a a commonality there that really brings people together. So it's interesting how Git has really evolved the, the ecosystem.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I just wanna Yeah. Go on like just gonna emphasize a little bit that importance.

We keep bringing up the importance of, like, leaning on your IT teams if, you know, you're buying from the business side and team members trying to understand what are the resources. Right? Do we have a center of excellence that we can tap into? And even if Salesforce is new, I mean, I've spent extensive time getting training over the years, multiple certifications with global entities that certifying DevOps.

And this is not always just, you know, a challenge. We have multiple different Salesforce clouds that, businesses wanna implement. There's one hiccup. Right?

But then you have cross clouds. You have GCP come in and play, WS a bunch. You're adding AI layer into that. You know, we have to make sure that we're doing our due diligence from the very beginning before we're even making any purchasing decisions.

Asking questions like, what do we need to be, aware of when it comes to security and managing that for our software development teams as well as testing and everything else, skill sets and expertise in there. And I think that that's, I know there's a comment from Kenny in there. How do we get this all the way up to the top? I think that's still a huge gap.

I think that it's been a gap for a few years within our ecosystem. I think with all of the learning tools, including Trailhead and the free offerings that, you know, Gearset has and other vendors have, the we know we're not meeting that bar. Right? And where is the level of knowledge?

Where does it need to be? We're still gonna be working to get there, but it is gonna take some time. And the more of us that can amplify and get the word out together, the better. We wanna equip everybody on teams. It doesn't matter what hat you're wearing. We want you to have a good understanding of why this is so important.

Yeah. And kind of alluding to, aspects of the DevOps life cycle that are being extended. And part of, to to Kenny's point, once again, how do we get that message to the top? I think one of the key things that has happened in the Salesforce ecosystem this year, there's been two big DevOps based acquisitions this year. The first, is Gearset's acquisition of Clayton, which is huge, not just for us at Gearset, but for the ecosystem in shedding some light on the importance of that DevOps life cycle and having, to to your point, Blanca, robust security measures and practices in place that help with that. Rob, tell us a little bit about the acquisition and why that's exciting, not just for Gearset, but for the wider Salesforce ecosystem when it comes to code scanning and security best practices.

Sure. Yeah. So I think, you know, it's very easy to you know, when you're you're first starting sort of adopting DevOps or or what, you know, what, you you believe DevOps may be, it's focusing so, so hard on the on the deployment step. Okay? It's delivering your code from a to b, and and just getting things out the door.

Now a bigger part of that, arguably, is delivering not just from a to b, but delivering from a to b with quality. Okay? Quality is so, so important in DevOps. You can do as many releases as you like, but if they don't work first time, it's still gonna take just as long to to get things out the door.

And I think what tools such as Clayton do in so many ways is emphasize and drive and and support that drive for quality releases. Now it is a a code scanning, tool in in this particular instance, so, you know, we are focused on that that code level thing. But it allows you to bring best practice, allows you to look for common issues, and they they could be, you know, functional issues or they could be security issues. You know, there's a number of of ways that you can, you know, number of lenses that you can look at that through.

The nice thing about it is, is that, you know, a lot of the common issues that it's able to identify, it'll actually fix for you as well. And it won't do that blindly. You know, you you certainly have that that human element. You know, the, the the AI is not taking over the world and just changing all your code for you, but it's guiding you.

It's elevating. It's educating, you know, and getting those standards in there so that, you know, if you look at the some of the DORA metrics, the, the DevOps research group that, that kind of defines what are good things to measure in DORA, it's not just the speed of your deployments or how quickly or how often you deploy, but, like, what is your change failure rate? You know? For all those deployments you're doing, you know, how many are actually nailing it first time?

How many of them are are, like, getting that quality? And when we talk about failure, it's not just failure to deploy. It could be, yeah, it deployed, but the business is saying, well, this I found this bug. I found that bug.

I found the other bug.

So quality, that's that's what Clayton definitely brings to the table. And it makes it easier to find, you know, those issues and find them earlier before they become big problems.

Yeah. Jeff, what are you seeing in your team in terms of the importance of, secure releases, safe releases, and, driving driving growth through quality Salesforce applications?

Yeah. I I think the I think, you know, to Rob's point, the door metrics, if you're not familiar with that, if you're very new to it, I think the door metrics are an easy way to to really see, some of the key metrics that you can measure, and you can find ways to measure those. Maybe, you know, maybe they're not perfect right off the bat, but you can really see in your DevOps process. You're like, are we tracking these kinds of things?

And what do we need need to do to track these? I remember the first time I was, kind of introduced to them. I believe it was a year and a half, two years ago. There was a big push from Gear Set on them, and I started looking and started thinking about, okay.

The you know, there were two or three things in there. I was like, We're not really measuring it that way. We were mostly measuring, you know, oh, how long does it take us from beginning to end? You know, we have a ticket, and how long does it take us to deploy it?

We're not really thinking of, you know, hey. How long does it actually take someone from the time they begin working it? How many times do we have change failures? I mean, we were tracking bugs, but, you know, were we really tracking that rate properly?

And, you know, tools like Clayton, I think, are are very important, that they continue to drive that, make it easier on you. I also think with the emergence of a lot of technologies, that we start seeing even on the development side, you know, Salesforce has the, Einstein, flow builder, for instance, for AI to, you know, to to kinda help you build flows. Right? And then you see a lot of that, in code as well.

I've talked to many developers that are talking about, you know, they use chat GPT to give themselves kind of that first step to begin building. And where does that really start impacting, and how would how would doing something like that maybe not get caught in static code analysis. Right? And, like, where do we need to have a little bit more advanced tools to start seeing not only, you know, identifying that AI is being used, but AI is being used used responsibly in your development processes.

And, again, I think that's why there's a big you you know, why Clayton is really kind of a big push in that direction.

Yeah. It's it's huge. It's huge.

Yeah. Blanca, so you come off mute mute there as well. Was there a comment that you had to?

Shift left. Move this all early. Don't wait till the end. I can't say how many times I've seen teams struggling in there, like, right before UAT or right before go live.

And it it really is concerning, and it and it's sad. I wouldn't, you know, like to be on a team that's experiencing that, and I have been in the past. And this is why I like to invest so much time here. I think we need to, you know, keep having these conversations and even outside of our teams that are doing DevOps that have hands on in some element of their DevOps process because, a lot of what I'm seeing from managing operations and IT for so many years is that you have to be able to talk to the business people and the executives that need to hear and figure out how to support, whether it's financially, whether it's acquiring more talent, whether it's in professional development.

But we need to start talking their language. We need to start understanding what are the value streams. You know, how do they relate to the KPIs the businesses are trying to move within the value streams, trying to identify where are these pain points, where where are the bottlenecks, and and really articulate in a way that they understand and they live and breathe every second of the day. Right?

So that they can come back and want to support and want to fund and want to grow our maturity levels, as SaaS development teams.

And I love what you said there, Blanca, about, you know, the value stream aspect because, you know, that comes back to the question that Kenny asked about how do we deliver that to the top. It's demonstrate the value. Okay? It's always about the bottom line of every business.

And I think if you can get those efficiencies, the less time you spend trying to get your code shipped, the more code you can write, the more features you can add, the more market differentiators you can add, the more operational efficiencies on your internal business you can add. So that's the value, and that's the, you know, the proposition that you give to the the top level of business, to say, like, this is why DevOps is important. You know, forget all the technical. You know, they don't care about Git.

They don't care about, you know, pipelines and and flows and back propagation and all the other great things that we we can do with tools like Gearset. They care about, yeah, but what does it do for my business? What does it enable for us? So, hopefully, Kenny, that's you know, between the the, the four of us, you know, that's that's kinda covered off that question for you.

And talk about security. Right? No company wants to end up on the headline that has gone south. And the way that you do that is ensuring that you're thinking about it in every step of everything that you do with building out the systems. Because in the eight, it in the end, it translates to a happy user, a happy customer somewhere and avoiding a big catastrophe.

The other big acquisition before I open fully open the AI can of worms that Jeff has Jeff has started to talk about, because we will open that can of worms. It feels, it it it wouldn't feel right to not open open that, open that up fully. But, many will be familiar with the big acquisition that Salesforce made this year of own, previously known as own backup. That was a really interesting thing for me. I think, it highlighted the importance of having a robust data backup and protection solution in place so that Salesforce teams can move with agility and with confidence. If you have a great backup solution, then it's likely that you're gonna be able to do that with with more confidence.

There's some theories flying around, on LinkedIn and what have you that that acquisition might be a bigger play towards, agent clouds and what Salesforce is doing with data center. But, but, Jeff, do you have any any opinion on that acquisition and what that kind of means for, Salesforce teams?

Yeah. So, I always I always look at these acquisitions very, to to see, like, how bought in is Salesforce to actually get in this acquisition, because I've seen it over the years. You know, you have Marketing Cloud, which was ExactTarget, Pardot, Tableau, Steelbrook Velocity. There's been, like, numerous different products that Salesforce has bought it bought over the years. And it really depends on, you know, what does what does that integration end up looking like and how much are they committing to to making that product a success?

OWN has been around for, not as long as maybe some people think they have been, but, I know that they're it's a very robust solution. I mean, I've used them at multiple different places.

I think that they got a very, well developed product, and I would expect them to to utilize some of the well developed pieces there. But it also makes you, kind of think when they when they purchase a product like this.

How much was Salesforce planning on kind of doing on their own side, but now they have this whole group this whole group that has, like, kind of this, mentality and this thought process on how they wanna implement this and how they want this to go forward?

And how does that change the trajectory of, you know, what Salesforce does? I mean, especially with you can kind of I I I've seen in numerous places, usually, you have multiple backup solutions, based upon how readily you need the data available. I've seen a lot of, you know, straight SQL backup systems using tools like DBAMP and, stuff like that, which DBAMP that's a that's a very interesting story as well.

But, you know, how does what I'm really curious to see is if the acquisition of own backup is is related to what's going on in the DevOps center and if that starts kinda coming together. I don't know that for sure, but, you know, it just kinda seems like a very similar, kind of area. Even though they're two separate areas, they they they relate all in a lot of ways. So, I'm curious to see how they go, and I'm curious to see how invested Salesforce really is into integrating it into its product.

Blanca?

No. I would agree, and I hope that it's something that they are gonna stay invested in because having managed operations in so many different flavors of technologies, not having, sufficient recovery, practices and policies in place is definitely a red zone nobody wants to be in.

And there are a lot of things that are moving very quickly. Right? We saw when data cloud was launched, we didn't have data cloud and sandbox it. So while we're not supposed to make changes in production, there was a lot of encouragement around that and also could wreak possible chaos and havoc, right, for posing challenges for teams that are like, wait.

We wanna do what? That's a little bit too new for yours. It's risky. When there's risk, you need to make sure that you have a plan a, a plan b, a plan c to Jeb's point with multiple vendors and really have, everyone on deck with understanding what that needs to look like.

And that's that's a tough challenge. So I do hope that they stay continued investment in this area. And I did see there's a a q and a that came up, and it's a question about Salesforce offering chainsets and DevOps, DevOps center for deployment, and they wanna know about gear set and if it's suitable for small teams.

Having been a consultant, having seen many teams of many sizes, running a nonprofit that is a smaller team, yes, having a tool like Gearset will definitely help. I think that there's a lot more flexibility and more robust functionality with tools like your set above, that that's available with DevOps center for sure.

You wanna make sure that even though you're a small team, you might grow. You might have more work. At some point, you need to be able to scale. And, what I've seen is sometimes teams pigeon themselves in a corner because they invest in a tool because they're trying to be extremely frugal and sometimes being too frugal. It's a shot in the toe and will keep you, in a big pothole and in a hurdle to make the race that you need with bringing innovation to your, constituencies.

So that's my take on that one. And, yes, I do hope that everyone is embracing, you know, everything from using Clayton with, you know, thinking through the code scans earlier and security earlier, thinking about your backups. Let's not omit any part of our facet within the DevOps life cycle because they are all equally important.

I agree. Rob?

Yeah. No. I I agree with that. And I think, you know, sort of to tie those two threads together around, you know, sort of Salesforce's acquisition of own, and they've, you know, recently announced that, you know, some of their command line tooling and their code analyzer stuff and that, you know, they're doing starting to move into sort of, you know, the the DevOps and deployment thing for for data cloud I've seen announcements for. You know? So, definitely, they're not taking their foot off the gas with all things DevOps.

So it shows, you know, the importance not just for for Salesforce but for, you know, for the Salesforce DevOps space, you know, how important all of these things are and to make sure that you are kind of covering each of those angles.

The other nice thing about it, of course, is, you know, as Salesforce continues to either internally develop or or acquire things that make up that DevOps life cycle. You know, it keeps us on our toes. You know, it allows us to have that opportunity to innovate. You know, we we do have a head start on DevOps center because we've been around a little while longer.

You know, we're in backup. Own backup is obviously in backup. You know? So, you know, all of this kind of competition, no matter where it's coming from, actually elevates the playing field of for everybody.

And the the winners in this are the peep you know, the people that are doing the job, the people that are needing these tools, that needing to implement DevOps and get best practice and and process within their organization, everybody wins because, you know, everybody is leveling up, you know, and Salesforce is definitely behind this this need for robust DevOps and and, you know, across that whole life cycle.

Yeah. Absolutely. And that's such a good message, I think, that underpins DevOps in its entirety is it's about everybody winning, and I think that twenty twenty four has really helped us stride further towards towards that.

I'm gonna I'm gonna gonna move on to to the final thing. I don't know if ten minutes is enough to enough to cover this, but but we're gonna go for it anyway. Rob, you alluded to some improvements that, Salesforce has made in terms of the developer life cycle and application life cycle when it comes to data cloud. Salesforce this year alone have, released data cloud properly, and people are starting to use it in earnest.

They brought out data packs to test properly with any data cloud implementation that you're doing, and they've also announced agent force testing center. I'm just gonna say agent force and and let let one of y'all take it away. Jeb, I'm gonna go for gonna ask you first.

Yeah. No problem. I mean, I I Agent Force is very interesting. On twenty twenty three, you, going to Dreamforce, you know, there was a big push on Einstein AI and, the data cloud. The data cloud, I think, really took the show.

And, you know, looking into twenty two two or looking into this last, unfortunately, I wasn't at Dreamforce this year, but, looking into, you know, a lot of the things coming out of it, Agentforce was obviously, like, the big crux of it. And if you look at a lot of the news around it, Salesforce is really pushing it hard. You know, they're they're hiring a lot of salespeople to continue to go through. I I can tell you from personal experience, I've seen a lot of, I don't wanna say, like, you know, overly aggressive, but there's been some, aggressive pricing on, trying to get people to adopt it. I know that there's a large investment in it.

And so as we start looking at these, it it kinda makes me think about or it makes me take a step back on, you know, what's the reason that we originally bought Salesforce. Right? And I think this kinda brings us back to the original or, like, back farther in the conversation, where, you know, we're talking about, you know, hey. People brought or your executives buy tools.

Right? So where do you think the accidental admin comes from? Right? Because we bought a tool.

We didn't have the ex we didn't have the people necessarily, experience to work on that tool. And then the accidental admin comes along, and they start doing it, and then things start evolving there. So when you start looking at, you know, even going back to products like own own backup and, you know, we're talking about DBM, it's like, hey. If you have a certain level of experience, maybe you don't need these kinds of products.

But if you wanna click and, plug and play product, which I think Salesforce is really like, you know, a cornerstone of. Right? Then you start looking into some of the stuff like Agent Force. And then when you start looking at the pricing on Agent Force, you start thinking about, you know, from the the bottom line perspective, like, how much does it cost to do a conversation, and how much is Agent Force going to save you?

How many conversations is Agent Force going to be able to, resolve?

And then as you get further into that, then you start looking into the investment. And like you had mentioned, like, Agent Force testing center, data cloud sandboxes, which, you know, is the big piece coming out of there, which, you know, Blanca's talking about.

You know, they're talking about AI generated tests. Right? So, like, AI kind of training your own AI. Right? Because you have the the, Agent Force prompt builders. And so now you have kind of this testing idea that, like, hey. We're going to have a solution, that's able to give you kind of the the equivalent of, like, you know, kind of regression tests on your back end code, but training, like, the more Agent Force model.

And, you know, Salesforce obviously doing the free AI specialist cert, trying to get the rest of us in there as well. I think it's it's a big push.

I would expect to see more. I know there's a lot of questions about, you know, kind of the pricing. How's that go? How's that move forward? Right? Because it is more of kind of a usage based model versus some of the other things we see in Salesforce, which is just kinda like, hey. You get a license and it comes with all these things whether or not you use them.

And we're starting to get a little bit more specific. Like, coming down, it it takes a little bit more investment, not just from our side as, people working in the technology, but also from the upper management side to think like, okay. What is the value here? And then, us being able to kinda drive that, you know, not just like, what's the value on what agent force is gonna save, but what's the value on our side on how much time we're going to be able to save and how efficiently can we work with this new tool.

So it's it's very curious to me. I mean, I'm still kind of in my, I would say I'm still in my infancy of kind of diving into it because we haven't totally implemented anything like that yet. I mean, I've done we've done some, kind of chat things in the the past using chat GPT, but I'm very curious into, you know, how does that compare to agent force and where does it go? And and it's it's mind boggling really to me to think about, you know, where we could go with this.

But, like anything else, you know, it's it's nothing stays the same. Everything changes. The only constant has changed, so it's just that next step.

For sure. It's two point o now as well, I think. So Yeah. So where can we get in there?

Blanca?

I think they're trying to keep up with all the l l m LLM versioning and and how much innovation they need to bring to support this. There definitely is a lot of excitement. There definitely is a huge level of tenacity to learn and skill up and figure out how can this solve a lot of business world problems. Right?

I do think that you'll have some players that are a little bit more skeptical. They're a little bit, you know, for good means. They're, you know, asking right questions. They're trying to figure out more, not just cost wise, but I'll go back to the security wise.

You know, there's, when there's a lot of unknowns, I like to think of it. I shared when you're prepping for this call that my eldest is officially a driver now.

So with great freedom and the responsibility to, you know, the, like, ability to do something like drive. I mean, you still have to think about everything, and there's a lot of roads, a lot of highways, a lot of signs, a lot of people in the world that have been trained in this area. And I think that AI is a flood of us trying to figure out how do we understand this better, how do we make sure that it stays secure, and that it's gonna be, you know, of quality that it's delivering and how we interact with and, definitely keep that that human touch and that human governance. Right?

Because, I don't know. I've been in computers all my life. I don't know that I trust computers to, like, try to figure out how to maintain my household for me, nor would I want it to drive my son who's a first time driver around on its own. You know?

Like, it's it's a learning curve for sure. I think, yes, we have to learn how to embrace and adopt, but I say do it with caution, choose to challenge, bring up questions, learn more, learn more, and learn more so that you can bring best practices, share those conflict points, and let's learn and grow together with this, new roller coaster that we have here.

Rob, you're off mute too. So any final thoughts on, on agent force or or how this might change DevOps?

Yeah. There's there's a brief thought I had when, you know, when when Jeb was talking about, you know, how on the one hand, you've got the automated testing using AI, and on the other hand, you've got AI writing the code that it's actually testing. And if, you know, is it gonna end up with just a case of, like, marking your own homework here?

You know, you and I think, you know, that kinda leads to the the the bigger point that I I wanted to make, which was, you know, as we increasingly adopt AI to do all these tasks, you know, the development task, whether it's flow, whether it's code, you know, the the building of of things, I think that the the DevOps surface area isn't gonna change. You know, it's still gonna need to solve the same challenges. How do we cope with the velocity? And with AI, the velocity is gonna increase. How do we cope with the quality? And, again, opinions vary on the quality of AI generated content, whether it's code, creative writing, artwork, or whatever. You know, the the creation phase always needs that that human second pair of eyes.

And I think, you know, the DevOps tooling is potentially at that intersection where it's not quite AI. It's still sort of more automation, but it's actually doing that quality gate checking. If we go back to what we're saying about Clayton and the code analysis stuff, for example, no longer are we gonna be checking the code of our peers, you know, or a or a junior developer that we're bringing up through the team and and, you know, whatever, you know, the the the human generated code looks like. The challenges and issues that may be put before us from AI generated implementation are gonna be subtly different enough that, actually, the tooling that we need to verify and check that type of content is also gonna need to subtly change.

So I think, you know, there's gonna be this kind of parallel movement of DevOps tooling growing to the point where actually it's capable of handling AI, both in terms of volume and in terms of quality. And I think, you know, as as we are kind of wrapping up twenty twenty four, you know, and now starting to look ahead to twenty twenty five onwards, I think that's definitely something I expect to see with the market moving forward with all the AI agents.

Thank you.

Thank you so much to the three of you for your insights across this panel. There is just one subtle question that is left based on this conversation. And, Jeb, it's to do with your background. Have we answered the question whether Rob Kahl is a myth or a legend?

Yeah. I'm glad I'm glad someone was paying attention, but, you know, Rob is Rob is both of those things. He is the myth. He is the way the legend.

If you've never been to shirt force, dot or was it shirt force dot org, I think? Yeah. It's one of my more favorite websites to go for, Salesforce related, paraphernalia, I guess you could say. But it's, yeah.

No. I I remember Robin running into Rob on, the street actually in San Francisco, and you can't miss him. He is the legend.

So it's it's always been good working with him.

There you go. There you have it. The answer is both.

Panelists, thank you so much. Really enjoyed this conversation. I'm really excited for what twenty twenty five is going to hold for for all of us. What I will say to, the folks that are still here with us, thank you so much for sticking around, but go and follow these wonderful people, on LinkedIn and where they hang out. Jeb, are you still in the Salesforce Discord Exchange a bit? Do you still hang out in there?

I am. I can, well, actually, I don't know if I am in your Discord. I know I was on the Slack for a while, but I can definitely hop back in there and, and, answer any questions you guys have.

Perfect. But you will see a plenty of Blanca, on LinkedIn. Be sure to be sure to follow Blanca. And if you have any questions, Blanca will be happy to help. And, Blanca, are you still in the job market in case anybody's after your expertise?

I am. And DevOps space is definitely at the top of my list and where I've been spending a lot of time because this is a challenge that not everybody likes to gravitate to.

But I'll just add, I'm on Twitter too. So, you know, if you need some mentorship in this area, don't don't, hesitate in reaching out. I really, really have a true it brings me joy to help somebody out. And if anytime someone can avoid some of the hurdles that I've seen for myself and for other teams, we are the trailblazer community, and we wanna make sure that everybody is moving forward successfully.

Thank you. Thank you. Well, be sure to reach out to out to Blanca, Jeb, Rob for any questions that you have.

Happy holidays, to everybody. Enjoy the final final week, before hopefully what is a very enjoyable, festive break. And we will see you all again on a webinar sometime soon in early twenty twenty five. Thank you, folks, and see you again Bye. Sometime soon.

Take care, everyone. Yes.

Thank you all. Bye.