Salesforce DevOps Center
Salesforce DevOps Center is a new tool released by Salesforce in June 2022. It is a salesforce release management tool built on top of SFDX and utilizes source member sObject.
Salesforce has used the Source Member sObject Tooling API along with SFDX to build DevOps Center. GA release is planned during 9th December 2022.
This tool allows you to deploy metadata from one Salesforce Org to another. For example, deploy custom objects, apex classes, profiles, etc. from Sandbox to Production. Traditionally we have used “Change Sets” to perform this task.
It also combines application life cycle management and source control.
App Lifecycle Management in DevOps center:
In DevOps Center, you will create projects and within that projects, you will create user stories associated with work items to track your changes.
Once the user story has been created, you need to associate it with an organization from where you will be retrieving your changes. It is necessary to authenticate your organization within the DevOps center tool to retrieve changes.
Once you’ve authorized the organization, you can download your changes via the pull changes button, and then you can commit it to the version control repository.
Elements in Salesforce DevOps center:
- Releases: Any set of changes will be grouped into a release. A release is split into one or more user stories.
- User Stories: These are defined during the business analysis phase in collaboration with the end users. A user story is related to one or more work items.
- Work Items: These contain the list of metadata items that are being changed. You create that list just once (unlike change sets which have to be recreated for every move between orgs). The item is pushed through the pipeline stages from dev orgs through to production.
- Pipelines and Stages: These are the sequence of orgs (stages) that the work item is pushed through from dev to prod. You can define different pipelines e.g. “uat” and “hotfix”.
- Bundled Stages: One or more stages in the pipeline can be marked as “bundled”. At this point, all work items in that stage are promoted at the same time to the next stage.
- Source Control: Behind the scenes, DevOps Center manages all GitHub branches, including moving metadata between branches, and Salesforce org. GitHub is the only current source control system supported.
- Pull Git Branch Locally (Optional Step): You need to pull your changes locally in your machine and then push them to the target org using the commands.
Installing DevOps Center Managed Package:
DevOps center is available for Enterprise, Performance, Professional, Unlimited, and Developer editions. To install, go to Setup and type “DevOps” in the Quick Find box.
