Keenan Vision Podcast - Produced by SalesforceDevops.net: Recent Episodes
Vernon Keenan
Hear the periodic industry analysis and insights from the only industry analyst who produces multimedia content on Salesforce devops and the enterprise software development industry.
This edition of the Keenan Vision Podcast I interview Nicolas Vuillamy, a CTO at Cloudity, who is a Salesforce system integrator and custom application developer based in Europe. We talk about his open source project sfdx-hardis (documentation, Github).
Nicolas and his team got a little frustrated with the devops sprawl and other management issues when it came to working with SFDX-CLI pipelines. To make it all work better they created sfdx-hardis, which is a layer on top of SFDX-CLI which encapsulates a lot of common commands.
In this interview we go over the motivation for sfdx-hardis for a bit, then we dive into a demo of its capabilities.
Be sure to check out how sfdx-hardis works by interacting with VS Code to interactively get parameters needed to run a CI/CD pipeline.
I hope you enjoyed this edition of the Keenan Vision podcast. Be sure LIKE and SUBSCRIBE. And leave a comment to let us know how we are doing!
This is a podcast presentation of an article published earlier this week.
https://salesforcedevops.net/index.php/2022/12/19/salesforce-devops-center-launches-with-high-expectations/
Salesforce last week finally announced General Availability of DevOps Center, a new Salesforce feature designed to ease application development and release management. DevOps Center was originally introduced under “safe harbor” in late 2019, so this announcement culminates one of the most anticipated releases of a Salesforce feature in the last few years. “DevOps Center is one of our most-requested and most-anticipated solutions ever because it increases efficiency and productivity – and it makes work easier and more accurate for thousands of development teams. It’s now easier than ever to manage changes, collaborate with team members, and ensure you have a synchronized source. And, it’s designed for fusion teams made up of developers across the low-code and pro-code continuum, so you can work inside or outside the DevOps Center UI-based app and everything remains in sync,” said Karen Fidelak, a senior director of product management at Salesforce, in a press release.
Table Of Contents
What is Salesforce DevOps Center?
Using DevOps Center
Who Needs Salesforce DevOps Center?
Salesforce DevOps Center Architecture
Salesforce DevOps Center Industry Impact
Additional Industry Reactions
More Coherent Salesforce Developer Tools for Trailblazers
Trailblazers Move Ahead with DevOps Center
DevOps Center Moves Salesforce Devops Forward
What is Salesforce DevOps Center?
DevOps Center is a new Salesforce feature that lets admins, low code developers, and application developers safely and easily deploy changes to a production org. To do its work, DevOps Center relies heavily on the Salesforce org source tracking features found in scratch orgs and some sandbox types. This lets DevOps Center automatically determine meta data changes in development orgs, update GIT repositories, and then deploy change artifacts to testing and production orgs in a managed devops pipeline.
Ben McCarthy, the founder of SalesforceBen.com, was asked what DevOps Center means for the Trailblazer community. “The Salesforce DevOps Center is an exciting product release for the ecosystem. It will not only change the way Salesforce professionals deploy changes, by bringing out a successor to change sets, but a new mindset, to meet modern DevOps best practices. This is exciting for both the businesses that use Salesforce, as they can accelerate development in a safer way, and the Salesforce professionals that will add another skillset to their repertoire,” said Mr. McCarthy in email correspondence.
Pablo Gonzalez, a Salesforce architect who writes about CI/CD and the Salesforce API at pablogonzalez.io, was blunt about how he thinks DevOps Center is about to make some waves in the Trailblazer community. “The release of DevOps Center forces everyone to think about DevOps. Before its release, we could still hide behind the comfort zone of change sets. Now, Salesforce is sending a strong signal: Git-based deployments and pipelines are the way to deploy changes across your Salesforce orgs,” said Mr. Gonzalez in email correspondence.
As everyone says, the biggest expectation of DevOps Center is to reduce or eliminate the use of change sets to deploy sandbox changes back to a production org. Based on my personal experience, DevOps Center has achieved that important goal.
This week on the Keenan Vision Podcast we delve into Provar Manager with Sam Arroyo, Provar product manager. In this tour we go through what is Provar Manager and get a demo.
- What is Provar and Provar Manager?
- The Provar Quality Hub
- Enterprise hub for collating and understanding all kinds of testing inputs
- Test Manager Demo
- Test Plans
- Application Lifecycle Management integration
- Analytics and metrics
- Salesforce DevOps Center integration
- Elements.Cloud integration
- Reports and Dashboards
About Provar Provar pairs intuitive testing solutions, including Provar Automation and Provar Manager, with world-class service to help teams capitalize on their Salesforce investment. Its comprehensive Quality Cloud suite of testing products creates a quality hub designed to improve release agility, drive down system defects, and advance innovation, meeting people at every stage in their journey — from the individual manual tester to comprehensive QA teams with automated workflows.
Visit www.provartesting.com to learn more.
We have more excellent Salesforce devops demos this week with another member of the SalesforceDevops.net Top Products Gallery, Prodly.
We are blessed to have David Clark, VP of Product over at Prodly to give us a tour of the product today.
- Prodly Overview
- Demo
- Environments
- Environment prep
- Ancillary Metadata Management
- Moving around ancillary metadata
- Saving tons of time
- Thank you everyone.
Prodly enables Salesforce teams to increase productivity by 80 percent while reducing risk up to 30 percent by putting next-gen DevOps into the hands of admins and citizen developers.
By reimagining the change management experience, Prodly delivers greater business agility, governance, and compliance without straining IT.
The company’s DevOps offering has rapidly expanded from a CPQ data deployment tool to include solutions for modern Salesforce DevOps, data migration, sandbox seeding, and SOX compliance.
Prodly sets the standard for low-code DevOps and can be implemented 20 times faster than traditional applications.
Prodly powers change management workflows for high-growth and Fortune 100 companies, including American Express, Expedia, Stanley Black & Decker, Cardinal Health, Nutanix, Johnson & Johnson, Splunk, Verizon, DoorDash, and Snowflake.
The company is privately held and based in Palo Alto, California with global operations.
For more information, visit prodly.co.
Welcome to the latest episode of the Keenan Vision podcast! This is part of our continuing series of hosting companies who made the SalesforceDevops.net Top Products list. This week we are graced with Dan Puttman who is showing us Salto. (dan.puttman@salto.io).
Salto translates your business applications’ configuration into text, allowing you to search, compare, test, deploy, and track changes across your environments. Dan shows us NaCl, the new application description language devised by Salto, and how it works throughout a Salesforce release management system.
Outline
- What is and Why Salto?
- Environments in Salto
- Salto Impact Analysis – Change Intelligence
- Demo of actual deployment
- Free Tier! – Great for impact analysis
For more information please contact Salto at https://salto.io or email Dan at dan.puttman@salto.io.
Dreamforce Recap Top Line – Definitely very successful
- Trailblazers
- Vendor Ecosystem
- Overall energy and push
Genie
- Opening keynote – as theatrical as ever. Brett Taylor took center stage to unveil Genie.
- A re-packaging of Salesforce Marketing CDP, nee Datorama.
- Adapters to each cloud
- Analysis
- Salesforce is being talked about as not being a growth company because they can’t compete in the “intelligent data layer.”
- This move is strong because Salesforce is now the #1 enterprise application delivery platform, having recently eclipsed SAP in quarterly revenues. It has a chance of sparking interest and orders from an ever-increasing number of customers.
- Tayor on CNBC on investor day: “Salesforce is a growth company.”
- However, Genie just makes Salesforce a slightly better competitor when compared to Snowflake, Databricks, or Fivetran. Since acquisitions are apparently not off the table, according to Taylor, I expect Salesforce to make some more moves
Best Sessions
- Pablo Gonzoles & Rob Cowell sessions were being talked about
- How Google does Salesforce Devops is very interesting, very opinionated. Important session because it talked about some open-source innovations in environment variables and feature flags.
- Sparsely attended session on how Salesforce does devops. Very fascinating under-the-covers look at service discovery, monitoring, and remediation. Showed off merlion, an open-source Python ML and anomaly-detection system called Merlion.
Ancillary Services Market for Salesforce is strong
- Salesforce did not announce any competing products
- Vendor villages were busy
- System Integrations are dominant
Salesforce Devops Strong
- Companies Exhibiting (14)
- ACCELQ
- Cloud Compliance
- CodeScan/AutoRABIT
- Copado
- Elements Cloud
- Flosum
- Gearset
- Metazoa
- Odaseva
- Opsera
- OwnBackup
- Prodly
- DevOps Center Integration
- Provar
- Salto
- With Secure
- Platform Cybersecurity
- DevOps Center not making much of a dent
- Still in Beta; no info on usage or satisfaction yet
- Prodly and Elements Cloud integrations
Journalistic Topics
- Press Conference
- The Press Room
- Foreign Press
- Trailblazers Love Salesforce
- It seems real
- People get a chance to become successful
- There is a support network available
- High Tech Bubble
- Reddit thread
- Customer attendee satisfaction
- Reminder about local trailblazer events
In this episode I get a full demo and product description from Copado demo star nlarrabee@copado.com Nolan Larrabee. This is a podcast series that is part of the Salesforce Devops Top Products gallery. Please be sure to check it out at https://salesforcedevops.net/index.php/salesforce-devops-top-products-gallery/.
I love how Nolan took us on a journey through a day-in-life of a Copado team member. I saw how Copado leverages metadata intelligence to keep up with org changes and to organize the development process. We also saw how Copado has an extensive Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) process integrated into the overall workflow.
Finally we got a nice demo of Copado Robotic Testing, the testing solution which is built into the platform.
For more information about Copado please visit their website at https://copado.com.
Show Notes * Check out Copado’s website to get a Demo * Learn, get certified, and spin up your own Copado learning environment on Copado Academy * Get started with Robotic Testing for free * Get started with Copado Essentials for free
In this episode I get to talk to Derek Ross, a demo star from Opsera. This is a podcast series that is part of the Salesforce Devops Top Products gallery. Please be sure to check it out at https://salesforcedevops.net/index.php/salesforce-devops-top-products-gallery/.
Derek gives a full demo of Opsera here. We start off with looking at how the Salesforce release management features work in detail. We then look at the workflow interface and how that works with cloud nave devops too. Then we go into details about observability and how to use information generated during devops to improve workflow.
For more information about Opsera please visit their website at https://opsera.io. I also recently completed a whitepaper on SaaS Devops sponsored by Opsera. You can get your copy of this important whitepaper at https://www.opsera.io/saas-apps-devops-whitepaper.
In this episode I go over the latest market research findings at SalesforceDevops.net. In this article https://salesforcedevops.net/index.php/2022/08/16/saas-devops-grows-to-critical-importance/ I go a public equity survey where I looked at 126 public cloud companies. I analyzed the growth and the number of new companies entering the market.
Based on those observations, I predict that SaaS devops will grow to critical importance because of the number and complexity of managing SaaS systems in the future
In this episode I am running solo and giving a personal report on Salesforce TrailblazerDX 2022 show in San Francisco. I also have detailed information on the latest product announcements on Slack and Salesforce DevOps Center. I report on an interview I had with the product manager and give you the scoop on what to expect.
https://salesforcedevops.net/index.php/2022/04/27/salesforce-devops-center-public-beta-due-in-june/
https://salesforcedevops.net/index.php/2022/04/27/salesforce-trailblazerdx-2022-opens-with-flow-slack-mulesoft-and-tableau-news/
This week on the Keenan Vision Podcast we continue our interview series with Waqas Nazir, CEO and founder of DigitSec, a leading Salesforce cybersecurity vendor (DigitSec.com).
https://www.darkreading.com/cloud/salesforce-devops-needs-guardrails
Here are the points covered by Vernon Keenan and Waqas Nazir in this interesting and lively conversation.
- Waqas shares how he was eminently practical getting into computers and engineering.
- He talks about his engineering background, which involved electrical engineering
- Then we hear about his experience at Microsoft
- He was lucky enough to be there when Microsoft made a major pivot towards security
- Waqas continues with his story, talking about his experiences in industry
- Vern asks what a Salesforce platform owner needs to worry about in cybersecurity
- Waqas talks about how platform owners need to understand they have responsibility for security
- Vern and Waqas talk about how digital transformations drive security requirements
- Waqas talks about building threat profiles
- Vern asks about management programs for cybersecurity.
- Waqas talks about some management frameworks and principles like security design
- Planning is key to cybersecurity success to make sure all bases are covered
- Vern asks about adoption, and Waqas talks about the range use cases
- Waqas comments on how cybersecurity integrates into devops and release management
- Vern asks about how DigitSec fits into the whole process of release management
- Waqas builds up the case for integrated solutions
- The shift left idea comes in by adding code scans to the IDE
- They talk about how expensive it is to fix bugs later rather than earlier!’
- Vern mentions how important it is to authenticate logins to key networks
- Vern talks about why he calls it cybersecurity and how he see DigitSec as risk management tool
- Waqas and Vern talk about the Dark Reading article about how Salesforce Devops needs Guardrails!
- Waqas talks about the cost-benefit analysis of how you can use metrics and other information to measure success
- Waqas talks about how security scanners slow people down
- Vern talks about the Dark Reading article and why people need guardrails.
- Waqas relates more about how important those guardrails are to business continuity
- Vern gets some really good advice on how to start a career in cybersecurity!
This week on the Keenan Vision Podcast we continue with our devops thought leader series with Kumar Chivukula, CTO of Opsersa. Check out how Kumar gets about making enterprises get the job done with less effort. Plus find out how Opsera is making it through the pandemic.
Here are the key points we covered in this conversation:
- Kumar’s journey through Silicon Valley with Adobe and Symantec
- Challenges faced when putting applications into the cloud
- Found there to be challenges in doing software development across an organization
- Kumar gives the Opsera elevator pitch for IT execs and Salesforce architects
- Kumar describes how to use Opsera in a Salesforce release management scenario
- It involves a integrating a bunch of tools into a pipeline
- Help to measure business value
- Vern compares Opsera to the Top 5 devops platform
- Opsera is a “command server” that runs devops pipelines
- Kumar describes how Opsera is an alternative management tool
- Describes some internal architecture for expansion
- “We are the Salesforce of [cloud native] devops”
- Kumar describes how Opsera makes Salesforce devops go faster.
- He said deployments go from hours to minutes!
- Helps teams avoid “burning the midnight oil” with Opsera
- Vern asks about the Opsera partner ecosystem
- Opsera makes it easy for a bunch of systems to be integrated
- Vern reminds potential partners to contact Opsera’s partner program
- Vern asks about key experiences as an Opsera founder
- He talked about the team, with all the sacrifices, especially with the pandemic
- Kumar gets to express how much he loves his employees!
- Kumar explains how some global system integrators use Opsera during digital transformation projects
- Kumar explains how customers get started with Opsera.
- “It’s easy!”
- Kumar talks about Opsera free trials
- Kumar gives advice for job seekers!
Join the Keenan Vision Podcast for a fascinating and fun interview of Gil Hoffer, co-founder and CTO of Salto, by Vernon Keenan. Learn about Gil’s perspective on Business Engineering, his love of code, and some cool stories from his past.
These are the key point covered in this lively conversation:
- Gil’s experience as a company builder
- How as an operator he figured out the complexity of configuring all the applications
- Vern describes how revolutionary products like HashiCorp Terraform was to devops and notes that Salto is kind doing the same thing with “infrastructure as code”.
- Gil describes how they invented Salto’s NaCl syntax to be a universal language for describing how to configure SaaS systems
- Gil describes how organizations may depend on a SaaS system like Zendesk, and sometimes that critical system is being managed manually, and how Salto can help businesses more formally engineer the solutions.
- Gil tells the story about how he got started with computers at the age of six, and that was his first experience with English as an Israeli child.
- Vern asks Gil about his experience in the Israeli Defense Forces, but any response would have gotten both of them killed.
- Gil shares more details on his motivation where he looks at processes and wants them to go faster!
- The occupation of “business engineer” is discussed. How it is now a profession, and how Salto supports being more rigorous leveraging the wisdom of the ages.
- Vern and Gil discuss the low-code features of the Salto UI.
- Vern describes why he likes Salto’s architecture, and Gil describes more how it works by ingesting data from a variety of sources.
- Gil explains why Salto is open source and available on GitHub.
- The free version of Salto is available at Salto.io.
- Gil discusses some of his customers. There are a variety of use cases! Some visionary, some practical.
- The Salto customer success team’s process is described.
- Vern describes more about why he likes Salto
- Gil and Vern discuss Salto’s investors
- Gil gives a pep talk about professional business engineering
Join the Keenan Vision Podcast for a fascinating and important interview of Ian Gotts, CEO of Elements.Cloud, by Vernon Keenan. So many important topics are covered by Ian and Vern you will want to listen through to the very end!
Here are some of the key points covered:
- How did Ian get so smart about application delivery and devops?
- What is Elements.Cloud as a product?
- Who is the Elements.Cloud customer?
- Ian describes how he has focused on the Salesforce Center of Excellence and how that has benefited users and platform owners
- Ian touches several times how devops has to move from “heroics to excellence”
- We give lots of love to people who want to enter the ecosystem and take advantage of trends with some career advice
This is an abridged version of a full review video that shows me using the product: https://youtu.be/sInYK7yCfxU
Read the review: https://salesforcedevops.net/index.php/2021/06/30/salesforce-extension-pack-review-breakthrough-tool-needs-improvement/
Before Visual Studio Code (VS Code) from Microsoft became the preferred integrated developer environment (IDE) for Salesforce, developers struggled with Java-based Eclipse because it was the only supported IDE. Now, in 2021 this has all changed with VS Code plus Salesforce Extension Pack integrated with command line utilities resulting in much faster Salesforce devops pipelines.
To help spread the word about this fantastic development, and to chime in with my comments and observations about the current state of the product, here is my detailed review of Salesforce Extension Pack for VS Code. You can check out my video review here
Salesforce Bridges the Gap with Salesforce Extension Pack and SFDX-CLI
SFDX-CLI is the key architectural component that connects simple scripting capabilities with many crucial metadata API and DML functions of Salesforce. Introduced in late 2017, SFDX-CLI plus VS Code integration provides a key touchpoint between the open source devops world and the Salesforce platform.
SFDX-CLI gives devops engineers a scriptable interface to a Salesforce org, which enables the orchestration of devops pipelines. Now, by marrying SFDX-CLI with the most popular interactive developer environment (IDE), Salesforce Extension Pack delivers a powerful and extensible working environment for Salesforce developers.
Salesforce Extension Pack Components
The Salesforce Extension Pack is a collection of eight separate VS Code extensions, which should be installed together by first installing the extension pack.
Apex: The Apex Language Server
Salesforce CLI Integration
Lightning Web Components
Apex Interactive Debugger
Aura Components
SLDS Validator: The Salesforce Lightning Design System Validator
Apex Replay Debugger
I will cover the most used parts of the Pack for back-end development, which are Apex, SFDX-CLI integration, and the Apex Replay Debugger. One component, the Apex Interactive Debugger, only applies to partners and is not used by most developers.
Conclusions
Salesforce Extension Pack delivers on its promise to augment VS Code, which makes it a powerful and productive platform for day-to-day Salesforce developer activities. With Salesforce Extension Pack installed, using VS Code and Salesforce CLI (SFDX-CLI) dramatically increases a developer’s productivity when compared to using Eclipse or the Developer Console.
There is still plenty to improve upon, such as the awkward installation procedure and other glitches that can turn into showstoppers. I wish that Apex language server were more lightweight, and that Java was not needed as well. And please slow down with all the versions!
Despite any ratings or other reservations, I wholeheartedly recommend that all new and existing Salesforce developers immediately adopt the best, free Salesforce development system available. Hopefully by seeing how using these tools improve the daily workflow of a Salesforce developer, you and your team members will be inspired to make the leap to the future today.
Hey everybody! It's Vern Keenan here with the very first edition of the Keenan Vision podcast recorded on Friday June 25, 2021!
Before I say anything else, I want to thank everybody who has supported me on this journey of helping people figure out Salesforce devops.
I couldn't do this without your support, so thank you.
Let's kick off with something everyone wants to hear about, which is the TrailheaDX 21 event broadcast this week from Salesforce headquarters in San Francisco. I'll be giving you my spin on things from the devops perspective.
TrailheaDX showed off low-code and high-code app production tools and strategies for developers, administrators, architects, partners, and IT leaders. On to Salesforce DevOps Center I mainly paid attention to high-code stuff, but there were some low-code advances too.
Dynamic Interactions is a new feature where writers of Salesforce Lightning Web Components may create interfaces that may be arbitrarily “wired” together via the Lightning App Builder. This enables components to receive updates and automatically transmit data updates to related components.
There is Flow Orchestrator for developing Salesforce workflows and MuleSoft Composer for designing multi-system interactions among some other data management announcements. So, with the delay of Salesforce DevOps Center and these winds of change around OmniStudio, it looks like the Salesforce devops tooling and lifecycle management efforts are still a work in progress.